Based on the CoWeb experience (Gudzial et al., 2001), successful Wikis activities involves four parts:

• Some introductory activities, often required, to get students thinking about the role of the Wiki and learning about its mechanics.
• Some not-required-but-useful activity to convince students that it can be useful to participate and to get students motivated to be involved..
• A period of open use by students, with a few activities.
• Some closing activities

“Good opening activities help students to get used to the Wiki environment and to posting and discussing in the Wiki. They also demonstrate some of the usefulness of the Wiki.”

“If the students are expected to find material on the internet, some instruction and class discussion on techniques for searching and evaluation of sources is needed to get the most of working in this environment.”

On the basis of the CoWeb experience, an “Exam Reviews” is particularly useful to get students to realize the benefit of collaborating across the group, because the joint effort leads to more answers and more answers to explicit questions.

A very extensive catalog of Wiki uses in teaching is provided in Guzdial, M. (2000). A Catalog of CoWeb Uses. The paper provides very useful information on the set up required, the contribution of the teacher and the success of the exercise.

As the authors indicate, the catalog itself is split into four sections, corresponding to the kinds of uses that we see in classes:

• Distributed Information: Teachers and students are sharing information, and the Wiki”s role is to ease the collection and distribution of that information. Examples: Class Hot Lists, Collaborative FAQs, Help Pages, Homework Hand-In
• Collaborative Artifact Creation: Students are working to create an artifact(e.g., a collaborative paper) are using the Wiki to gather the pieces, assemble the work, or just to coordinate the work. Examples: Creating a Case Library, Puzzles, Collaborative Hypertext, Student Extra Credit Link Lists, Student Advice Pages, Managing a Design Process, Collaborative Writing, Collaborative Glossary, Collaborative Adventure Game, Close Reading (The teacher posts some text for students to read and analyze)
• Discussion and Review: The Wiki serves as a place to review something (papers, ideas, designs) and critique/discuss them. Examples: Anchored Collaboration, Exam Reviews, Expert Reviews, Student Curated Galleries, Fishbowl Reviews, Restaraunt and Movie Reviews, Expert Commentary and Annotation
• Other: Those uses that we don”t have a category for yet. Examples: Who”s Who Page, Signup Pages, Collaborative Radio, Classroom 2000 to CoWeb Connectivity

A few examples include: Mostly from Matt barton

• Any class project with a reference or encylopedic format. Instructions, manuals, glossaries, and the like are all excellent wiki applications.
• A class or group project with a bibliographic format. Students could gather websites related to a topic, then annotate, rank, and organize them.
• A letter or statement presented on behalf of the class. These documents occur often enough in the business world, where the “on behalf” basically means that everyone involved signed off on a draft. On a wiki, such a project would offer everyone a better chance to make a contribution.
• A handbook or textbook. Students could build a guide to correct punctuation and evaluated as a class. Thus, every student would have a stake in the project and likely benefit from the instruction it contained. Students are also familiar with “textbook” English and its avoidance of personal-sounding prose.
• Assignments were individual responses to readings and questions created and posed by the instructors. These assignments were posted (for public viewing) in the course Swiki.

• Make sure students have timeoutside classroom hours to contribute. Eventually, dedicate some of the classroom or tutorial time to the editing of the wiki content.
• To really use a wiki, the participants need to be in control of the content.
• Make it as open ended as possible. For instance, have for requirement something like “write 50 sentences over the next X weeks, in any form (esay, comment, improving a page). This way, different people will be able to repurpose the site to what they want to use it for, and interact, rather than create a bunch of isolated, assigned essays.
• Consider using an improvement score for assessment.
• Consider having a first week during which students are limited in the number of words they can each write so to ensure that the wiki becomes everybody's production.