I don’t really use Wikis in my classroom. In fact, for a while, I couldn’t understand the hype about their application for education; and then it hit me, most of the educators I interact with (online) teach large groups of students spread out into multiple class groups. This type of set-up is an amazing opportunity for using a Wiki, it allows students from across the various class groups and even within the same large group of students to interact, communicate and collaborate…but in a school which has only 3 or 4 students per grade, like the one I teach in, a Wiki doesn’t really have much value. Or so I thought.

The standard application of the Wiki in education is that of a connector, allowing students to collaborate and experience the “Hive Mind” made up of their peers. It can be used to create study guides, show mastery of material, or just to bring large groups together on a specific topic. But there is another application in education that is rarely discussed, its value in terms of differentiated instruction, and this is the application that is valuable to small groups and large ones alike.

When you create a Wiki, you create a community and within any community there exist various responsibilities and jobs that must be accomplished for the community to thrive. In our case, we have contributors (those who write articles), editors (those who edit articles), formatters (those who make sure articles are properly formatted), fact checkers (those who verify articles for accuracy and add sources), administrators (those who supervise all aspects of the site and police activity), and I am sure you can come up with many more. Each of these roles carries with it certain strengths and foci, while at the same time they still interact directly with the content, making them perfect for an implementation of differentiated instruction.

A student who is a natural leader, can be made administrators, on who is very critical can be made editor (and the teacher can work with him to teach him how to be constructively critical), one who loves trivia can be a fact checker, and the student who has an eye for design can be formatter. Assigning student their roles based on their strengths allows each student to enjoy learning and feel a part of the team. Even putting personalities and strengths aside, this different roles also allow the teacher to vary the workload based on the student’s abilities without making that student seem like any less of a contributor, the editor may do far less work than a contributor, but will still interact with the material and learn from the experience, and not be made to feel any less a part of the team than his peers.

I will certainly be implementing a Wiki in my classroom this year to allow my students to shine, each in his own way, and I hope you will too!