WIKIS in the EFL classroom

                  

       Day by day I am discovering a completely new world of different technological applications and programs for me. It’s amazing how during three weeks I learnt about so many high tech tools. As a TEFL professional, learning new tools is very important for me, because, first of all, they help me to reach my students from a technological point of view and, secondly, stimulate their interactive learning. However, the road has just started and there are still so many new tools that I have to explore, to discover and to learn.

       One of the latest means of digital learning I got acquainted with is wikis. Wikis is a collaborative web page. Mostly, it found its implication for teaching and learning purposes.  Why collaborative? The answer is simple. Wikis is suitable for collaborative tasks, as it gives teachers as well as students an opportunity to contribute to the particular assignment.

    Together as a whole class we contributed to a story in Wikis and essay in Google Docs. I must say that was an amazingly fun and enjoyable process, especially in the case of a story. As soon as I wrote my part of the story, I logged in every time in order to see what happened to the main heroine. Every time I logged I told myself:” It is interesting what will happen next?” At the moment I forgot that the whole class was writing the story, the thing that drove me was interest. It’s like you are reading the book and wait to see what’ll happen in the end. The end of our story turned out to be really successful. I suppose if someone reads it, he/she will not understand that this story is the result of the collaborative work of 30 students. Wikis helped us to work team wise, be creative and learn more efficiently.

    Along with the collaboration Wikis also shows to what extent everyone contributed to the assignment which can be viewed in a history tab. For me as a teacher, wikis gives a chance to watch the story as it’s been built; see students’ contributions, edits that are mechanically saved in the history tab and add new developments.

     The only challenge that I find necessary to state is the difficulty of assessing students’ learning. I am inclined toward the opinion that Wikis is intended more for student’s autonomous learning and assessing. Student himself understands how much he learnt and how he can use this acquired knowledge. Yes, you may say that while assessing I should pay attention to the amount of work each student contributed to, but if I pay attention to only this fact then assessing will be wrong, because one student may write 2-3 sentences, but have a meaningful context and the other student may have a very long context ,but completely useless one. That’s why we as the teachers should not base our assessment while working with Wikis. That’s why, I as a teacher suppose that Wikis is more suitable for in-class tasks and activities.

     As for the Google Docs, I had the opportunity to work in this platform during my previous group works. The main advantage of using this tool is that you can see what your peers are writing or editing at the very moment, which means that you can discuss, correct or add something very quickly without waiting time for someone to look at your work and leave comments.

     Summarizing the above-mentioned, I may say that wikis is a really useful and effective tool for group work and in-class activities which promotes creativity, collaboration and what’s important improves writing skills.