Thing #14 - Wikis

My exploration of the various wikis lead me to quite a wide range of types and educational levels which I felt would give me a broad range of ideas to get my brain going on how I might implement the use of wikis in my own professional and personal life.
I'll start with my favorite one, a Salute to Seuss. This was a special project for a specific purpose during a specific time period (4 months). The ultimate result and culmination of the project was for all participants to participate in a "read along" using Skype on October 22 to celebrate "Seuss Day".
The features included a slideshow, worksheets, and specific standards broken down by grades. Although geared toward kindergarten through 6th graders, this type of special project could easily be adapted to secondary education as well. I would love to try this with my choirs possibly for a UIL competition. We usually work toward this goal for about 4 or 5 months and could use the wiki for various steps along the way such as information/history on the music we're learning, language pronunciation for our foreign language pieces, comments and editing from the students with their input on the progress we're making, information on extra rehearsals, and finally, comments on the other performances that we listen to.
Another wiki that I looked at was the FHS Wolves Den set up by a teacher in a small 1A school district for her classes. It was very elaborate, detailed, and all inclusive - basically, a complete "manual" as it were for her students and parents. This reminded me of what you would find out by coming to open house (meet the teacher night) and reading all of your child's "packet" about a class all rolled into one website! It even had a link to the school website as well as a link to email the teacher, not to mention a link to the town newspaper! This type of wiki would be an excellent tool for me in my profession to replace our "Choir Handbook" which basically encompasses our calendar, grading policies, performance policies, uniform requirements, and all general information for the year.
Finally, I explored a 6th grade classroom wiki - Room 15 wiki. This was more user friendly and organized in a more basic way, obviously, to be more readable and usable and to invite more editing and commenting from 6th grade students and their parents. It had sidebar links to information for assignments and classroom information. I think if I were to set up a wiki for my class I would start with a more basic format as this one, rather than the more complex one such as the FHS Wolves Den that I discussed above.