Just this morning, we gave away our 300,000th free classroom wiki! This classroom has joined over 2.4 million other educators and students in one of the largest educational communities on the internet. Way back in January of 2006, we pledged 100,000 free classroom wikis to primary and secondary educators. We were so excited by the response that, when we hit the mark in September of 2008, we decided to keep going and give away 250,000 more. Over the past four years, while we were working hard to get wikis into your classrooms, we’ve seen others make offers of free wikis, free social networks, and other online services for education, only for those offers to end. But we keep getting bigger and better, in part because giving away free classroom wikis is crucial to what we do as a company. The thing is, free really can work. But first, the offer must be genuine, sustainable, and well managed, and it must be central to a company’s business strategy. For us, there’s no need to spend money on a large sales force or expensive marketing programs. Schools and districts buy our Private Label service because their teachers and students love our free (and private — and ad-free) wikis. "Doing well by doing good" is most meaningful when the good you do leads directly to your success. Building a business like that is harder than it sounds. We’re proud to say that’s what we’ve done. Please join us and make sure your favorite K-12 educator is in the loop. Spread the word by sharing this blog post or retweeting our Twitter tweet.

Sometimes we look at what someone is doing with Wikispaces Private Label, and it really makes us go, "Wow!" Actually, that happens a lot. But sometimes we manage to wrangle a chat with the people who built the site and wrestle their secrets from them. And when that happens, we put up a new case study. In Oakland County, Michigan, the Birmingham Public School district is challenging old-fashioned notions of pedagogy and really looking forward to 21st-century ways of teaching, and thinking about teaching. They’re using their Private Label site as a platform to bring tools and ideas together, and to give teachers, students, and even parents a place to collaborate and get involved. A well-structured site was just the beginning. Since 2008, the teachers and students of the Birmingham Public School district have been learning from each other what makes a successful educational site. And now you can learn from them, too. Read the case study here, or share some of your own secrets for wiki magic below.

On Wednesday, May 5, at 11 a.m. PDT, our very own Sarah Cove will be presenting at a Techsoup.org webinar on wikis. She and her fellow presenters will be discussing wiki basics — what they are, what they do, why they are so cool — with particular emphasis on the role of wikis in libraries and nonprofits. If you’re in a nonprofit and have been looking to learn a bit more about wikis, this is a great opportunity to see what they can do and how they can be used in a nonprofit setting. And you’ll get to hear from people who have actually been using them in their work: find out what they’re doing with wikis, how they got started in wikis, and more. This is a rare chance to talk about wikis from the unique perspective of nonprofits, so don’t miss out: sign up for the free webinar.

Have you ever wanted to know more about this "Private Label" thing we keep talking about? On May 20 at 10 a.m. PDT, we’ll be holding a free informational Private Label webinar, and all your questions will be answered. At least some of your questions. That is, the questions relating to Wikispaces Private Label. We’re going to take a look at some of the basics of site administration and the ways a Private Label site could be used in different organizations. Or, if you want to see some of the flashier stuff or have a specific question about Private Label sites, there will be a live product demonstration and Q&A. And Sharon Betts from Maine School Administrative District #52 will be on board to show us what a real Private Label site looks like in action. If you’re free on May 20 at 10 a.m. PDT, you should definitely stop by. Sign up for the webinar.

We know how hard you work to get your pages just so: a lot of thought goes into how you arrange pages for lesson plans or project briefs, and a lot of work goes into building those pages. Page templates are a great way to make all that planning go farther without any extra work. So what are page templates, exactly? A "page template" is a special kind of wiki page. Just like any wiki page, you can edit it, put text and images on it, embed widgets into it, save it — and then go back to edit it some more later. But it’s special because you can use a page template as a foundation for as many new pages as you would like. What can I do with page templates? Most new wiki pages are empty by default. But if you use a template when you’re making a new page, that page will already be filled with whatever text, images, widgets, and formatting you built into the template. Say, for example, you have several groups of students working on a lab. You know that they’ll all be taking the same steps, and recording the same kinds of observations. Create a template called Lab Notebook. Then, when the students are ready to create new pages to keep their records, they can start a lab notebook page that you know will prompt them to record the right items in the right places. Or say you are using your wiki to plan a conference. You’re going to have several different breakout sessions on each day, and you want to have individual pages for each breakout session. If you start by building a Breakout Session page template, you won’t have to bother formatting each page by time-consuming page. Just pick the template off the drop-down, and you’re ready to go. Well, that makes sense. Now how do I use them? Nothing could be simpler: go to Manage Wiki > Templates, and name your new template. If you want, you can build your template based on the content of a page that you’ve already done. Edit the page template the way you would edit any other page, and hit Save. When you make a new page with the New Page link in the action bar, pick the template you want from the Use a Template drop-down. When you start a new page by following an existing link to a page that doesn’t exist yet, select the template from the drop-down list before you hit the Edit button. Either way, everything you built into the page template will already be on the page by the time you start editing. If you ever want to make changes to one of your templates, go to Manage Wiki > Pages and find the template on the list. You can tell which pages are templates because it says so right in the page name: my Testing page template, for example, would be space.template.Testing. Changing a page template won’t do anything to any pages that already exist; it will just have those changes ready for the next time you use the template. Let us know how your wiki uses page templates below or with an email to help@wikispaces.com.

Odds are, as a dedicated Private Label site admin, you’re spending a fair bit of time building wikis, maintaining wikis, and talking to your wiki organizers about ways to make wikis even better. And you’ve probably run into some wikis that are so successful that you know your users will want to make similar wikis again and again. Which is why we suspect that, if you aren’t using wiki templates already, it’s because you don’t know about them. We thought that this would be a great time to remedy that. Fair enough. Tell me about "wiki templates." Happy to oblige. A wiki template is the answer to the question, "This wiki over here was really successful, and we’d like to use it again. How can we do that?" It lets you copy all of the pages, files, and settings (with the exception of individual page permissions) from your successful wiki into as many new wikis as you want. Let’s say you’re running a Private Label site for your nonprofit. You are setting up local volunteer offices around the country or world, and you want to make sure that every time someone opens a new office, they have a wiki that’s pre-packed with all the reference files and pages that you already know are going to help them. Set up a New Local Office wiki template, and all that work is already done. Or say your school wants to have e-portfolio wikis for each of its students. Just set up an e-Portfolio wiki template, and they can open their wikis and get to work right away. I like the sound of that. We thought you would. How do they work? Go to Site Administration > Wikis and follow the View and Create Templates link. There you’ll be able to manage any existing templates, or create a new template based on any wiki in your site. A wiki template is a designation that you assign to a wiki — much as you would promote a site user to site admin, or a wiki member to a wiki organizer. Any wiki on your site can serve as the source for a wiki template, or you can create a new wiki specifically for that purpose. The name of the template will let your users know what kind of template it is, and can help you keep track if your site has multiple wiki templates. When someone creates a new wiki, they will be able to pick a Wiki Template from the drop-down list. Be sure to give your templates clear, concise, descriptive names so that your users know what they are looking at. Once the user has chosen a template, their new wiki will be a snapshot of the source wiki at that moment, all ready for fresh modifications and a new batch of members. If you make any changes to the source wiki, any new wikis built on the template associated with it will reflect the changes. But the changes won’t have any effect at all on existing wikis. If you have any tips for your fellow site admins on how wiki templates have been useful for you, add a comment below or email us at help@wikispaces.com.

As of June 18, we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 (IE 6) on Wikispaces. Starting May 24, visitors to any Wikispaces site using IE 6 will see a warning banner linking to this blog post. We will continue to support Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8, as well as other modern web browsers. If you are using IE 6 we encourage you to upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer by running Windows Update or by contacting your IT department. If you can’t upgrade Internet Explorer we heartily recommend Firefox, a free download. While we understand this change may inconvenience some of you, it’s a necessary change. Given how few people still use IE 6 as their web browser, the benefits are too small to continue to justify the amount of work that is required to keep Wikispaces working on IE 6. Importantly, your choice of safe, fast, and free alternatives has never been better. Here are some very good reasons to start using a newer, better web browser: IE 6 will be nine years old this summer. By Internet standards, that’s old! Microsoft has released two entirely new versions of Internet Explorer since then, in October 2006 and March 2009. IE 6 is unsafe. In addition to dozens of security fixes over the years, IE 6 is currently vulnerable to 24 known insecurities that are unlikely to ever be fixed[1]. These vulnerabilities put you, your computer, and your data at risk if you browse the Internet with IE 6. IE 6 is slow. Modern browsers have made tremendous performance strides in recent years. A new version of IE, Firefox, or Chrome will feel like a rocket ship in comparison. IE 6 does not support modern web standards. We’ve spent a considerable amount of effort over the years developing fixes and workarounds for Wikispaces to function on IE 6 — workarounds not required for any other browser. We have some awesome changes planned and we simply cannot make them work in IE 6. You’ll also find that many other websites work much better when you upgrade to a newer web browser. Fewer than one in twenty visitors to Wikispaces uses IE 6. Of those who do, the vast majority are visitors who never login to the site. When we end support in June, we’ll be joining Google Apps[2], YouTube[3], and dozens of other web companies[4] who have already ended support for IE 6. So again, if you’re running IE 6, first, check with your IT department if you have one. They may already have an upgrade for you. The next best option is to run Windows Update and upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. If you’re unable to run Windows Update, Firefox is a great option. Here’s our full list of supported browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+ Mozilla Firefox 3.0+ Safari 3.0+ We’re always here to answer any questions you have: drop us a note at help@wikispaces.com. http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11/ http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars http://www.ie6nomore.com/

We’re always working to make Wikispaces better. In fact, we just recently made a few improvements. Maybe you’ve already noticed. In case you haven’t, here’s what’s new: List of pending invitations Now it doesn’t matter whether you’ve invited people to join your wiki by username or email address. Either way, you’ll be able to find a list of all those people who haven’t made up their minds yet on the membership page of your wiki under Pending Membership Requests. Tag filtering for files and pages Go to Manage Wiki > Files. Do you see it? Over there, on the right. Now go to Manage Wiki > Pages. There it is again! It’s a list of your tags. Because now you can filter your pages and files by tag. It’s just another easy way to track, organize, and manage all the assets on your wiki. Guest message posting Sometimes you just can’t assume that everyone involved in your wiki has an active user account. Whether it’s because you want to preserve your permissions settings or because your collaborators aren’t interested in membership, there may be times that people want to ask questions, get answers, and contribute to the discussion without the full access that comes with an account. Now you can let that happen. Just go to Manage Wiki > Permissions and change your settings to allow message posts from non-members. (This feature is only available on Super-plan wikis and Wikispaces Private Label.)

Hello, I’m Ryan Koopmans, the most recent addition to the Wikispaces team. I’ll endeavor to make the website an even better experience for you as part of the software engineering group. I’m interested in realizing the full potential of online collaboration, so clearly I’ve come to the right place. Previously I’ve worked in consulting, government, startups, and a little what-have-you.

ISTE 2010 From June 26 to June 30, we’re going to be at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Denver. For those of you who have never been, ISTE is an annual event for education in technology: thousands of people from all over the world — teachers, technology coordinators, administrators, library media specialists, teacher educators… — will be meeting to learn from each other. Because it’s such a great way to meet so many educators and because it’s such a blast being around everyone, we go every year. This year Adam Frey and James Byers, the founders of Wikispaces, will be in Denver from June 26 to June 30. They have some great events planned so if you’re going to be in town please let us know — and make sure to sign up for our party. Conference Events All week: Office Hours! See below. Saturday, June 26, all day: EduBloggerCon Wednesday, June 30, 8:30am - 9:30am: Wonderful World of Wikis: Practical Classroom Wikis for All Ages with Vicki Davis and Adam Frey Wikispaces Party! If you missed our party at NECC 2009, you missed a great night. Don’t make the same mistake twice. From 6:30 - 9pm that Tuesday night, we’ll be hosting a party to share some food and beverages in celebration of another great year and conference. Don’t miss out: sign up now. Jazz at Jacks Denver Pavilions, 500 16th St #320, Denver, CO 80202 (Just a block and a half from the convention center.) 6:30 - 9pm, Tuesday, June 29 Office Hours We come to ISTE to give some presentations (and throw a party) but mostly we come to meet as many of you as possible. We love to hear your success stories, get your product feedback, hear what challenges you have and how we can help at your school or district, and learn as much as we possibly can. Our Office Hours are time we set aside for one-on-one meetings with anyone who would like to talk with us. First come first served, so please sign up and let us know when you’d like to chat. We look forward to speaking with you. Sunday, June 27, 3 - 5:30pm Monday, June 28, noon - 2pm and 3 - 5pm Tuesday, June 29, 9 - 11am Wednesday, June 30, 10am - noon Check out our schedule and let us know you’re coming.