The word "wiki" (say “weekee”) is Hawaiian for "quick." A wiki is a type of web site used for facilitating collaborative work. In a wiki, each page can be freely edited by anyone, or can be limited by the wiki creator to those with the proper permissions. Instead of sending emails back and forth, use a wiki when you want to create a shared web space where more than one person can contribute to the page by editing to add or delete content.

Like all web pages, wikis support text, graphics, and hyperlinks and usually connect to other related pages. Groups can share photos, documents, multimedia files, links, and other content typically found on a web page. Several wiki sites have newer features which allow contributors to embed components such as polls, calendars, and other gadgets of interest to the collaborative group.

One great advantage of a wiki is that every change made to a wiki page is tracked and recorded in the site history. Users can add or remove content easily, and the wiki page can always be reverted to a previous version if needed. Most wiki sites also allow administrators to control both editing and viewing permissions under different levels of control for various pages within the site. Although it is possible to abuse such a system, it is also one which allows for the most flexibility and takes advantage of the collective knowledge of participants.

A more example of a wiki is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Anyone can visit a Wikipedia page, edit it, and save the changes. Once the page has been saved, this new page is posted for everyone to see. Check out Wikipedia's definition of wiki.

There are several wiki hosting sites where groups or individuals can set up accounts for building a wiki. Wikispaces is a free wiki host that is used frequently by educators. (In January, 2007, Wikispaces made the offer to give away 100,000 free wikispaces to educators wanting to set up classroom sites for collaborative essays, group study guides, online lesson plans and notice boards.) Pbwiki is another free wiki site that requires users to enter the password before editing a page. A newer host of wiki sites is Wetpaint. Most wiki hosting sites have good support for getting started through online guide or tutorials.

In addition to sites that host wikis, free software such as MediaWiki and MoinMoin can be downloaded and installed on local web servers.

Wikis offer excellent collaborative opportunities between students across the county, the country or even the world! Visit these links to learn more about how wikis are being used in K-12 education:

• Flat Classroom Project is an excellent example of how two classrooms came together from across the globe to collaboratively create project pages in teams of two students, one from Bangladesh, one from Camilla, Georgia in the U.S.
• The Aristotle Experiment is a classroom wiki set up by David Conlay, a teacher in California. Take special note of his student project pages, starting with Mango Street.
• Learn more about how wikis are being used in educational settings from David Jakes, Wild About Wikis.
• Teach With Tech is a blog/podcast site, maintained by Chris Essex at Indiana University School of Education Instructional Consulting office, which lists many wiki references. One links to a list of Educational Examples of Wikis that includes some great uses of teachers creating a space for students to work collaboratively.
• WikiJunior is an open-content textbooks collection for children. Also see Wikibooks for online textbooks which can be edited by anyone who cares.
• The Scribe Post Hall of Fame Mr. Kuropatwa’s students, or “scribes,” participate in creating a math teaching page with content to share and be reviewed by other students in the class.
• Making the Case for a Wiki does just that - makes a case for when and why wikis could be good learning tools. This article also includes a comparison of several different wiki tools.
• Wikimedia Commons is a searchable database of over 2,000,000 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
• Wiktionary is a companion to Wikipedia that is a collaborative project to produce a free, multilingual dictionary with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms, and translations.
• Wikiquote is a free, online catalog of thousands of notable quotations and proverbs.