Wikis

Honesty, before this class I had no idea how wikis worked.  I knew what they were, mainly because of Wikipedia.  We used wikis on blackboard for one of my classes last year, and even though I used it I was not sure how it worked.  I thought that wikis would be a lot more difficult than they are, which is why I was a little scared of them at first (okay not scared like terrified, but just gun shy to use them).  Now I can say that wikis really are quite simple and useful.

Posting on the wiki was actually really simple.  I did not have any problem when posting my information on it.  The first problem I ran into was trying to highlight words and make it so you can click on it and go to that link.  The first couple of times I tried I failed.  Every time I would try the entire link would show up instead of just being able to click on it.  For example. http//www.utk.edu would show up instead of just The University of Tennessee and being able to click on it.  I did not figure out how to do it until I came to class the next day.  Once I got it though it was really easy.  The other problem I had was with my picture.  I could not figure out how to do the wraparound text.  I tried about 13 different things on my own but just could not get it.  I ended up just putting the picture at the top.  It was not until I got to class that I saw that all you had to do was double click it and choose the edit picture option.  Once again, once I got it figured out it was easy.

Wikis could be very useful in an English classroom.  Students could use wikis to work on group projects or even group papers.  Another useful thing could be to have a wiki set up for students to work on their grammar.  There could be different links to click on that would take them to different grammar rules and have examples.