The users of the wiki that I intend to create will be 6th grade students at Castle Park Elementary in Chula Vista. This may end up including all 6th graders or may just be my class; that depends on my administration’s decision on whether or not to allow us to continue to group and rotate all of our 6th graders for the majority of the day.

These students come from a variety of different backgrounds and skill levels with computers. Some are quite fluent in using related internet applications, such as myspace and facebook, where some of their experience will transfer into the domain of the wiki. Others come from homes that do not have personal computers and their only computing experience is with infrequent computer lab time at school.

Our school has a new computer lab with 30 PCs that have only been used to run an intervention program called Successmaker. I’d like to get groups of students working on these machines to do research and use the features of the wiki to collaborate and construct an entry to our wikispaces site that I will construct.

Working in groups and using computers should be a motivating experience for them. The knowledge that their work will be public, that it can and will be viewed by other students, teachers, parents, and administrators will hopefully inspire them to do their best work. The peer review aspects of the wiki should also help to ensure that the information will be factually correct and relatively free of errors. By making it abundantly clear to them that each time they make an edit, we can all see who did it should help to keep the site free of unnecessary or unwanted content.