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Teacher Review for PBworks

Deliver, Engage, Create, Publish with PBWorks Wikis

Charles Y.
 Classroom teacher
Bethel Park High School
Bethel Park, United States
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My Subjects English Language Arts
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My Rating
Learning Scores
Engagement
Pedagogy
Support
My Students Liked It Yes
My Students Learned Yes
I Would Recommend It Yes
Setup Time More than 15 minutes
Great for Creation
Homework
Individual
Knowledge gain
Small group
Teacher-led lessons
Whole class
Great with Advanced learners
General
How I Use It
Since 2008, I've enjoyed PBWorks wiki as a quick and easy way to deliver content to students in ELA classes. In recent years I have used it as a hub for students to create webpages, collaborate (lit circles), present work (slides, videos), submit work (essays, research papers), and build mock social media projects (e.g. Facebook-like pages for Macbeth characters). The editor is similar to working in Word or Google Docs and includes tables and plugins for embeddable widgets and YouTube videos. Along the lines of a flipped classroom models, I set up assignments in a wiki page with mini-lessons, essential questions, directions, hyperlinks, and downloadable forms. With our PBWorks wiki, I've had students complete a full paperless research paper project.
My Take
To get your feet wet, try delivering your instruction on a wiki page. Taking a standard lesson, perhaps a text, an image, or even a slideshow, deliver these along with questions or activity instructions. As you gain confidence in gaining your wiki skills, you'll ready yourself to teach students how to edit their own pages and submit work. It does take time (a few hours) to set up student accounts, especially if students don't have email access at school; but I found that it was a time-saving flexible way to prepare class activities, provided your students have computer access. There is an online manual for educators and I have always found the PBWorks support staff to be very friendly responsive. Most importantly, my students gain essential digital literacy skills from the experience of working in the wiki environment of designing pages, formatting and organizing files, and submitting documents online.