It’s done!  After much work, I have created a classroom wiki for my final project: Miss Little’s Online Art Classroom.  I used the one-month long unit of Visual Art 30 curriculum that I created for my Education Professional Studies 100 class, so that I had a strong idea of how this project would apply to the real curriculum I will be teaching in the future.  It really helped to know beforehand what this wiki needed to accomodate.

I chose to create a wiki because it accomodated many different tools that I wanted to use, and because it allowed for class collaboration.  For example, I really wanted the information that the students came up with in the group research assignment to be available to everyone, not just the students who found it.  This way, the students are collaboratively making their own resources for this unit.

I created this wiki using Wet Paint, a wonderful site for creating wikis.  It has several features that are very helpful to educators, such as the option to use pre-set classroom templates (which I did, but ended up altering greatly for my personal needs), and the ability to remove all advertising from education wikis.  Visually, Wet Paint wikis are very eye-catching, and you can download extra little design elements that will compliment whichever theme you choose.

The only real difficulties that I found with creating this wiki was that sometimes the Wet Paint formatting functions are a little fickle.  Just a heads up.  However, when they do work, you can make a beautifully laid-out web page.  I would also recommend that anyone creating a class wiki should SPELL CHECK EVERY PAGE.  Nothing is more irritating and unprofessional than spelling mistakes on a web page.  Don’t assume that because you’re a good typist, you didn’t make any mistakes.

Please, let me know what you think of my wiki, or feel free to ask any questions.