The easy way to get student to join a wiki

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the best way to allow students to join a wiki. Below is what I have found to be the fast painless way of having a whole class join a wiki.

Sure you can invite each student to join the wiki by sending out invites. The issue is students use a multitude of free e-mail accounts and depending on their settings the e-mail invitation can be swept away by the spam filter never to be seen again. In my experience this seems to happen a lot with Hotmail and Yahoo. You just never know where that e-invite for the wiki will end up.

To get around this, I prefer to put the students in charge of signing up for the wiki. All you have to do is allow them to join by changing the permissions on your wiki.

Most teachers, and rightfully so, like to keep their wikis private, or not allow anonymous edits. But to allow students to join the wiki the wiki has to be 'joinable'. So the quick and easy way to do this is to set your wiki to be open for people to join for a certain time and then close it again.

I'll put this into an example I had just yesterday.

A 7th grade teacher wanted to get all 22 students signed up and using the class wiki. During the 75 minute class period each student grabbed a computer from the cart and went to the class wiki address.

As the students were getting themselves to the correct site the teacher simply turned the wiki to be "open" so that students could join.

1. Click on the Settings button

2. Click the Permissions Tab



3. Click on Change Settings

Next you will be taken to a page that you can change the settings for your wiki.

4. Click to allow everyone to view and join your site.



5. Click to allow anyone to join the site.

6. Click Next and change the permissions.

Now that the permissions are changed. The students navigate to the site, click the join button in the right hand corner of the site and walk through the process of creating an account and joining the class wiki.

After the class is over. The teacher simply goes through the process again to change the permissions back to where they feel comfortable.

It's a quick way to get students to join a site without having to worry about the invite e-mails getting lost in the shuffle. I've even had teachers who have opened the site to allow people to join as homework and then closed it the next day. As the created of the wiki you can see all the members and you can block anyone who you do not want to allow. If someone happens upon you open wiki you always have the right to block them.

I hope this helps some of you out there who are looking for a quick way to get students up and running with a class wiki.