Wikis are a fabulous classroom tool

One of the Thinkquest teams from my school did their project using a wiki. The whole thing about Thinkquest is that there has to be a real world problem to solve and you have to think of a good solution to the problem. The project needs to be not only internet research but also consulting experts, field trips, experiments, polls, journals, videos etc all put together with a lot of thinking involved. Too often a project is seen by students as internet or book research, cut and paste of information, and copying pictures. I like the Thinkquest approach. A wiki is a marvelous tool for a project. Actually, I think wikis are amazing - they are like website but without the HTML headache! You can upload documents to a wiki very easily. I notice that currently a lot of teachers have a classroom blog as well as a classroom wiki. What a great combination. Parents can get the regular update of the blogs but also the display of work that is uploaded to a wiki. This wiki can be viewed at http://futuresavers.wikispaces.com/