Setting+Up+a+Wiki

There are a number of websites available that can be used to create free wikis. Wikis in Education is one free site used by educational facilities to create online wikis to be used in the classroom.[| http://wikisineducation.wetpaint.com/]  However, Wikispaces [] is the website used to demonstrate the setting up of this Wiki.



After creating an account on the Wikispaces website, it is easy to start your first wiki. Enter a name for the wiki. This will create the web address of the wiki, for example, the address for this wiki is esc413wikis.wikispaces.com



The next step is to choose the permissions to the wiki. Public means everyone can view and edit the wiki, whereas protected, everyone can view the wiki but only members can contribute or edit the pages, private means only members can access the wiki. The person who creates the wiki is the organiser and they have overall control of the wiki, unless they invite others to manage it as well. The organiser can invite other people to join the wiki by sending the web address to people by email. If the wiki is viewed by everyone people can ask to join by a link embedded within the wiki that contacts the wiki organiser. It is then at this persons discretion who they allow to join.

Within the classroom environment the teacher and students would have access to the wiki, but other stakeholders, parents, teachers or other students, may want to participate and could be given access to join.



There are video tutorials to help navigate through the steps to change the theme of the wiki, add pages, files, images and videos and logos.





A log is kept of any recent changes to the wiki which can be linked to the creators email, keeping them up to date of any changes. This link would be valuable to a teacher using a wiki as a collaborative learning platform, as it would enable them to see which students were contributing and what they were writing or editing.

The wiki is easy to navigate around. Clicking on the 'manage Wiki' icon on the tool bar takes you to the page above which is the main menu of the wiki. This is where pages, files and tags are accessed, members names listed, invites created and general maintenance of the wiki is carried out.