Exploration of Educational WIKI

WIKIS

An educational wiki site, its objectives, user friendliness and inherent features.

During my years of teaching I have noticed that children learn through play and easily remember important facts and strategies in helping them to be more active in sharing their ideas in solving problems which involve their school and personal life. Because of the development of information communication technology in the forms of educational games and programmes, where it caters for the learning needs of children, which are use to help reinforce learned concepts that are taught in the classrooms, children are more engaged in their school life. An educational wiki site which capture my interest as a grade two teacher is titled ‘Games in Education’ which can be found at ‘http://gamesined.wikispaces.com/’.

I have selected the wiki site ‘Games in Education’ to critique because of its focusing objectives, user friendliness and inherent features.

This educational wiki site is not only user friendly but caters for students who are at different levels academically who are in the same classroom or students at home with siblings of different age levels. For example in a class one may have a student who is functioning at a grade one level in mathematics and another student who may be at a grade three or four level. The site seeks to aid in the benefits of cognitive development and focuses on providing stimulating experiences while playing games that reinforces and teach concepts in mathematics, literacy and science as well as other topics of interest which concerns our world. While engaging in the various games it allows for ‘refining’ of team/ group work skills.

The layout for ‘Games in Education’ is very easy to follow, understand and navigate, which makes it user friendly. With the simple design structure, links and use of proper headings which are straightforwardly identified on the home page and on the other pages, the wiki can effortlessly be used to do the various activities for which it is intended. Also because of not being frustrated in terms of using the site, it makes one want to return over and over again. I have given this site as an experimental trial to my students and they can’t stop talking and sharing their excitements about it. Some of my students have gotten their parents and their other sibling involved in the gaming programmes as well.

The design of the inherent features of ‘Games in Education’ has various links/tabs which take you through the site as a participant or visitor to educate about the topics which are covered in the wiki as its objectives states. The tabs that takes one to the games selected also provide other samples of related games, which provides a variety of choices of games for a particular topic. It also displays the facts about recent changes/updates, files, pages and its members. Generally the features of the site are user friendly for both adults and children.

Ways the site can be improved

In my opinion and from the feedbacks from my students’ trial experience with the site the things that I would want to improve on are to clearly present the objectives on the home page so that it could easily be understood by students and adults, to make the general design of tabs more ‘child’ attractive and use different captivating colours for each block on the different pages.