Keep Materials Organized

Teaching writing with a wiki helps both you and your students stay organized. Instead of collecting physical papers, everything is online and always there. There is little worry about a text or piece of work being swallowed up by technical malfunctions or email spam filters. Or the claim of such things happening. Once a text is saved on a wiki you can always find it again, even if the student changes the name of a page, doesn't link to it, or does something else to Orphan a Page, you can always retrieve it.

They will never again show up on the day a piece of writing is due and claim that:

  1. they forgot their paper at home
  2. their printer broke
  3. no one was at the front desk in their dorm and they can't get their document from the printer until someone is there
  4. their computer lost their document
  5. they lost the flash drive their paper was on and they didn't back it up
  6. they wrote this paper on their parent's computer and it is trapped there until …
  7. they wrote this paper in a campus computer lab, and they saved it to that computer, or so they thought, and they went back and it was gone.

Instead, the writing will all be there when you sit down to grade, or they won't, but either way there won't be any random documents trickling in.

In addition, The students always have access to the course materials. The can easily refer back to the guidelines of whatever project or assignment they are working on. Students that need to miss class for any reason also have easy access to the materials that were discussed that day. This cuts down on the amount of administrative time you spend sending or bringing materials to absent students.

Using a wiki also cuts back on the amount of paper needed for your class. Instead of making copies of everything for all of your students, it is on the wiki. You have right up until the start of class to finish an assignment description — you no longer need to get it down early enough to have copies made. This also allows you to easily update assignments and fix typos. Students always have the most up-to-date version of the assignment.

Materials management is much, much easier.

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