Creating Wikis

Creating Blogs

Creating Wikis

Wiki

A wiki (means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian) is like a public website or web page. For example, a person starts a topic by sharing an article and other users can edit, delete or change it in whatever way they want. In this way a wiki differs from a blog. In blogs there is a blog owner and other visitors or followers can just make some comments on the posting of that owner while in wikis anyone can make changes or edits on the postings. So wikis are more interactive than blogs because they can have writers more than one on the same article. A wiki provides a collaborative writing environment for users. And using a wiki is very easy. You just signs up and create a Wiki account for free and then start to use it. You can add new pages to a wiki besides editing previous ones. One of the most famous wikis is Wikipedia. It is an online encyclopedia which provides users add, edit, and change what they want to. There are also other free web sites to set up wikis on the Internet and some of them are Pbwiki (short for ‘peanut butter wiki’), MediaWiki, and Wikihost.

Creating Blogs

Blogs

A blog is a web page on which you can publish your writings, videos or pictures. The word blog stands for web log. Blogs are social because via them people can communicate and connect online. Everybody can create and use a blog easily. People can share their writings, journals and audio files and comment on others’ entries by blogs. So how can people benefit from it in education and teaching? Blogs used in education are called as edublogs. A teacher can use a blog to inform her students on some topics, to give news about the course, to give homework, study tips or summaries of the lectures to her students. This kind of blogs used by teachers is known as tutor blog. Also a student can create a blog and these kinds of blogs are student blogs. A student can be asked to post her assignments via her blog by her teacher. Also she can use it to communicate with her friends and to comment on their posts. Even she can have a contact with students from all over the world. The last kind of blog used in education is class blog. This blog can be created by a teacher to be used in course. This time the teacher and all learners of the class use the same blog page to post their works. I think this blog type is the most interactive one. Students can share all things related to the course and practice the target language in an interactive way. There are lots of free blog sites on the Internet. Some of them are as follows: Blogger, Getablog, WordPress, and EzBlogWorld.