Edudemic, a great site for educational ideas and resources, has a great article entitled "9 Tools for Using Wikipedia in the Classroom."
The article discusses how to use Wikipedia in the classroom in some great ways. These ideas where developed by psychology students as a cool way to use Wikipedia in course writing assignments. Some of the ideas and tools:
- browse Wikipedia for articles that need work - clarifications, citations, fact checking
- help pages on using Wikipedia
- a Wikipedia assignment wizard for teachers
- a feedback tool
- discussion forum on educators using Wikipedia in the classroom
- support for student peer review
- support for student work
- a suggested timeline for using Wikipedia in the classroom
- a student activity page
These are some great tools and ideas for using Wikipedia in the classroom. Many teachers do not allow students to use Wikipedia as a single source, or even as a source, for their work, but I think that Wikipedia has a lot of good information and the idea of having students research pages and then make changes, citations, and error corrections is a great lesson idea.