Using a Wiki in a Community of Practice to Strengthen K-12 Education.

Sharing knowledge can be a challenging and the one of the biggest challenges when it comes to sharing knowledge is how to do it. What is the best way to communicate knowledge to other individuals? With high stakes testing in schools it is imperative we use knowledge that resides in our brains and create new knowledge that will launch innovative teaching approaches. With that being said, the problem becomes managing all of that knowledge. It is said that teachers share knowledge because they would gain something from it – whether it be a stronger understanding of an idea or a better reputation – and because they felt an obligation to their communities – whether the obligation arose from a sense of principal or compassion. One way for teachers to share and manage their knowledge is a wiki. Wikis are convenient because of their speedy editing, non-code web users, multiple contributors and no one person in charge.

I also chose to create a wiki in my classroom. The idea behind my wiki was to create a space in which all the teachers to contribute something. Our school is pushing differentiated instruction and I thought creating a wiki would be a good way to help this process. All teachers differentiate instruction, they just may not know it, and some teachers differentiate more than others. That means all the teachers in our school have some knowledge of how to differentiate instruction in the classroom. This wiki is a way to manage the knowledge of all the teachers. Teachers can post their ideas, methods or concepts that they use in their classroom for other teachers to try and also use the wiki as a resource to find new concepts that other teachers are using.

Sheehy, G. (2008). Using a wiki in a community of practice to strengthen k-12 education. . TechTrends, 52(6), 55-60.