Edutopia project in Vail School District

     Teachers from Vail School District have found a way to create a wealth of resources they can share, comment and modify. The story first started in their own school; they collaborated, discussed things and recreated what was traditionally found on textbooks. By using an open-source product, called Mindtouch, they created a collaborative wiki, on which they posted their creations. This wiki is accessible in their district, in other districts, across the different states, and hopefully beyond.

http://www.edutopia.org/stw-differentiated-instruction-budget-resource-collaboration-video

     Both teachers and students can benefit from this wiki; every school, every student may access this online material; collaboration is encouraged amongst the different teaching teams, children seem to enjoy the online material and feel proud that their own teachers participate in such a project.

     Using wikis as a collaborative seems interesting to me; they are "an innovative way of enriching the learning environment of students with adequate ICT skills and access to the Internet" (Kovacic, 2007). Through wikis, teachers are able to access a great variety of material, designed by teachers and "tested" in a real classroom context; they may also discuss the pedagogical values of such wikis and add their own contribution. This can result in increasing connectivity between teachers and students, but also between schools. However, if wikis are a great tool for the whole community, it might be a threat to intellectual property: most teacher creations would fall into a somewhat "public domain", easily reproducible.

    Regarding the use of wikis in the ESL classroom, I would see no objection in using online wikis designed by teachers; yet, I still doubt of the relevance of wiki collaborative writing at the secondary level. Although Sze (2008) recorded positive results in his wiki collaborative classes experiment, I think that creating a wiki requires a level of maturity and discipline not all secondary students have; the same pilot project might not have the same results in Hong Kong and in Trois-Rivières.