So, you understand my lament when, last year, I realized I couldn't avoid rhetorical vocabulary any longer. I had to teach it, and I had to teach it well. And, I didn't want to spend longer than necessary. It was in this pit of despair that I had the idea to put WikiSpaces to use. I devised a lesson with the objective of getting all students to a "proficient, target, or mastery" level for all of the essential terms for the unit. I won't go into details of the terms or the unit, because this isn't an English blog. But I will divulge some of the benefits and drawbacks to using WikiSpaces.
First thing the kids notice about the platform is it's appearance. Most Wikis are pretty bare and sparse. There isn't any fancy font or graphic you can add to make it look better either. They complained a lot about this. But not as much as they complained about the annoying formatting issues they had. Some of them, and I am the same way, wanted everything to look uniform and organized. But, the formatting in WikiSpaces was clearly not a priority with its developers, and making a uniform project takes a lot of time, dedication, and patience... lots of patience. Along that vein, simultaneous editing was very challenging. Students' work was constantly written over and deleted if they were working on the same page as another peer. They came to distrust WikiSpaces to a comical degree, and they copied everything they had done one too many times. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
The benefits were pretty great, though. The Wiki that the class created was an awesome opportunity for students to create their own official page, and share their own wealth of information on a rather boring subject. It created for me a comprehensive guide to rhetorical vocabulary, and I have since passed the website on to other teachers as a reference guide for them. So, the process wasn't awesome, but the product is long lasting.