 Brent Raabe I was first introduced to PBwiki at a learning team seminar with Alan November. In his seminar he challenged us as educators to let go of the control in the classroom and give it to the students. One of the tools he suggested was the use of a Wiki site. To quote from the website; “A PBwiki is an easy-to-use web page that multiple people can edit. Use PBwiki to make a wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich “In this article I will show you how to set up an account and give two ways in which I have used pbwiki to give my students more ownership of their learning. Setting up a pbwiki only takes 30 seconds.
1. Go to http://pbwiki.com/ 
2. Enter you name and an e-mail and they will set up the page for you and send you a link. 3. Click on the link and it will prompt you to enter a password and agree to their terms. Anyone you share this password with will be able to edit the site. 
4. You are now at your new page. There are also a number of video tutorials along the way to help.  Two Possible uses of pbwiki in the Classroom The first way I have used a wiki is as a semester end cumulative review. I post all the course's PLO’s and have the students add notes under each outcome. By the end of the activity the students have a comprehensive outline of all the material created and edited by them. This semester I plan on having my classes add to the existing pages.  Some examples of the students’ work:

The second way students use wiki is to produce a daily summary. Each lesson a student is nominated to be the scribe. The scribe is responsible for posting a summary of that day’s lesson on class wiki site. At the end of the semester we have a detailed summary to review from.
 I have only used pbwiki for a semester but am convinced that it has a positive impact on the student's learning environment. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact me. |