THE APPLICATION OF COLLABORATIVE ONLINE WIKIS

María José López Aguirre
Week 10: Online Collaborative Writing Using Wikis.
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The reading for this week share amazing information about incorporating software such as wikis to promote collaborative writing for ESL students. My initial impression of this article was good. I like this article because is the description of a writing project base on the experience of a teacher. The element that really caught my attention was the tool incorporated to enhance writing competence. Teachers should take advantage of collaborative online wikis to promote writing tasks in the ESL classroom. Teachers can create their wikis for free, and provide a specific task to students, so they will have a purpose to access. Having students writing in groups is very useful as they work together to improve the organization of their ideas. Something I want to remember from this article is that teachers become technicians as they conducted students how to work on this tool. They introduced the prompts in order to encourage them to collaborate in their paragraph. Something I learned from this article was the importance of free expression and collaborative peer review. In that way, when students work in wikis they obtain feedback from their peers, which is different from the teacher’s, and orients students to accept constructive criticism in order to enhance their text. What surprised me in this article was the fact that it is easy for teachers to be monitoring and supporting the process of their students’ writing as they have free access to this tool. To conclude using wikis writing projects is an effective tool to develop students’ writing skill.