Submitted by Fiona Beal How do you encourage the use of Wikipedia in your classroom? I have noticed that whenever upper primary school or Middle school students that I teach look for information on the Internet for an assignment, one of the first sites they visit is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is very often a student’s first port of call. The interesting thing about Wikipedia articles is that most if not all of them have references that one can check. What is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia...

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Have you visited the Wikipedia Education Program website? The idea behind the Wikipedia Education Program is simple: Educators and students around the world contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for class assignments. Previous Wikipedia blogposts This is a very exciting world-wide project and we have written two posts about it to date:    1) Wikipedia #1 –The Sinenjonga students in South Africa make a plea to cell phone providers…and the result 2) Wikipedia #2: Hav...

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In our previous blogpost about Wikipedia entitled ‘Wikipedia #1 –The Sinenjonga students in South Africa make a plea to cell phone providers…and the results’ we reviewed the plea made by a group of Sinenjongo High School students from Joe Slovo Park, Milnerton, Cape Town, South Africa who made a video in 2012  appealing to South African cell phone operators to provide zero rating or free access to Wikipedia. Today we note how this project is spreading through Africa and we ...

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