A useful wiki for sharing education resources
Announcing Usefulwiki.com – a useful wiki site for sharing educational resources and exploring the use of internet communications for informal learning in educational settings. The site began life as a partnership effort between myself Andy Roberts and Linda Hartley earlier this year, and now it’s beginning to pick up a bit of attention, so we feel it’s the right time to gently launch it into the wider world. Of course there are already some sites providing educational resources of sorts, some by subscription, some pay per download and some for free. Some even ask for submissions but Usefulwiki is the only one which encourages the education sector to submit resources for immediate publication and peer review, without having to wait for some IT, sales or Town Hall person to get around to updating the website.
It’s a wiki, just like wikipedia but it’s not an encyclopedia. It’s for putting online and organising educational resources, links, plans, pictures, video, writing, pdfs – anything that might be useful to others in education. For teachers, teacher trainers, teaching assistants, learning mentors, parents, school students, ed psychs, sencos – anybody involved in the process of teaching and learning somewhere.
Why would anybody want to give away their hard gathered resources? Well we know there are some who prefer to hoard their knowledge and keep it to themselves, but there are also certainly many others who see nothing but benefits all round to putting digital materials together, available to everyone, for the betterment of education practice worldwide. Thousands of people collaborate to put important information as well as trivia onto the wikipedia, so why not spread the collaboration ethic to the world of learning as well. Those who share will also learn better how to collaborate online, which will stand them in good stead for the emerging world of e-learning which is where a lot of people think the future lies.
So what’s on the Usefulwiki so far?
- Better Reading Partners – A 10 week intervention programme to improve reading using real books.
- Project Based Learning – Articles, examples, resources and links for project based learning.
- Teaching Assistants – Resources, links and advice, also teaching materials for NCFE level 2
- Autism - advice re SEN policy plus external links
- Practical literacy ideas – A selection of practical ideas collected and evaluated.
- Primary ICT
- Recommended software for education
- Primary Modern Foreign Languages
It’s also the home of the award winning Classroom Displays blog and is definitely in it for the long term.
So if you are, or know somebody who is involved in schools, or cares about education then please point them at the usefulwiki.com, where they can make a good mark from the beginning, and don’t forget to bookmark the site, and maybe stumble, digg, del.icio.us, magnolia it etcetera along with this announcement if you think it’s worth it. Thankyou.
Related posts:
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
