If you’re anything like us, you spend a lot of time adding new pages and uploading new files to your wiki. Over time, we — that is, you — have ended up with hundreds of pages and files. Probably. And you need a good way to keep track of them. Which would mean you are so very happy that you can use tags to keep track of all those pages and files. Because tags are a super-simple way to categorize and classify all those tricky little cyber-assets that it would otherwise be so easy to lose. What can I do with these "tags"? Oh, we’re so glad you asked. When you tag a file or a page, it’s like slapping a little magic LoJack on it that makes it come when called (if you’ll forgive our mixed metaphor). Say you create a page with an assignment for your students, and you tag it "homework." But, to do that homework, they need to download a worksheet. So you upload the PDF, and you tag that "homework," too. When your students look for "homework," both tags come running. Or maybe you want to get a quick snapshot of all the pages each member of your team has been working on. If you’ve all been tagging those pages as you go, a search will give you an instantaneous list of all of Terry’s pages. How do I tag something? Nothing could be simpler. For files, go to Manage Wiki > Files, and select Show Tags, History, and Size. The tags for each file will appear under the file name. To tag a file, click the Edit link under the file name and type your new tag. Once you’re done, click Save to save your tags. When you create a new page with the New Page button, it asks you right out if you want to tag the page. If you decide you want to tag an existing page — or change or delete tags on an existing page — you just click the down arrow on the Page tab and choose Details and Tags. You can manage the tags right there. Or you can go to Manage Wiki > Pages and tick the Show Tags and History box. There’s no limit to the number of tags you can add to a page or file, and no limit to the number of pages and files that can share the same tag. So don’t be stingy. Now that I’ve tagged them, how do I find them again? If you just want to track something down, you can either search or filter. To search for tagged files and pages, simply type the tag into the Search box in your wiki’s sidebar. You’ll see the tag listed in the search results. Just click on it to see all the pages and files with that tag. Or you can filter by tags to find the page or file you want. Go to Manage Wiki and pick either Pages or Files. To the right, you’ll find a list of existing tags. Just click the on you’re looking for, and the list will be narrowed to only the pages/files with that tag. Or, if you have a whole bunch of tags, you can type the one you want into the Find Tag field, and it will pop right up. You can also filter by tags when you’re adding a file to a page. On the right-hand side of the file upload tool, you will see Filter by Tag and Find Tag. You can use either option to narrow down your search. And you can always go to Manage Wiki > Tags to see the complete list of tags, how often they’re used, and the last time they were applied. …and that’s it? Of course not! Would we be so excited if it were? You can also limit to a single tag whenever you embed a List of Wiki Pages widget on any page in your wiki. Just enter the tag you want to narrow by in the Show Pages Tagged field. (I use this one myself. The To Do page on my wiki has an In Progress column that links to all my projects with "ongoing" tags, and a Completed column for my finished projects. Easy reference!) Or you could embed a tag cloud into your page or navigation bar. The tag cloud is a visual list of all tags you’ve assigned to any of the pages in your wiki. Tags that you’ve used a lot are BIG AND BOLD, and tags that you haven’t used all that much are little and meek. Hover your mouse over any tag to see how times you’ve used it in your wiki. Click it to get a list of the pages you tagged. And because we absolutely love tags, we’re always finding better things to do with them. Like— Ah, but that would be giving too much away. Trust us on this one, though: it will be pretty great. And we’ll tell you as soon as we can. If you’ve found other interesting things you can do with tags, leave a comment below to let everyone know about it. And if you have any questions, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com and we’ll sort you right out.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2010, at 11 a.m. PDT, we’ll be holding one of our Private Label webinars. It is probably the best way to learn more about Wikispaces Private Label: you get to see it in action, and learn what it does and what it can do. But even if the overview and product demo are always nice (and they are), the heart of the webinar is the chance to hear from someone who is using Wikispaces Private Label in the real world — to see what they’re doing with it and get the hows and whys of their Private Label site. In this particular instance, Dave Dai will show us how Michigan State’s College of Education uses wikis for different organizations and groups in the college, as professors’ websites, as course wikis, for training and professional development… and on and on and on and on. Very exciting. And even if that’s not what you do (i.e., you are not a university), it’s still neat to see how a Private Label site can be used to cover a whole lot of ground. And, as always, we’ll wrap this party up with a round of Q&A, where you can get answers to all of those wiki- and Private Label-related questions you’ve been saving up. So that’s Tuesday, June 22, at 11 a.m. PDT. Will we see you there? Please say yes.

Rosemary Mitchell started the ART4Cast wiki in May, 2008. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I am the Visual Art Specialist at a model Title 1, urban school for 700 high-risk, low-income, majority ESL learners. Each class has visual art for one hour each week because of a Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program Grant, beginning in 2008. As a 27-year elementary teacher, luckily with a BFA, I was the recipient of this grant the year after receiving my technology certification with the eMints classroom technology program, where I used a wikispace for my 4th grade computer classroom. The only way to design, organize, and schedule this "NEW" art program was with a wiki. I communicate and plan with my 30 teachers successfully for this research-based grant through my wiki, because it gives them control of their scheduling conflicts and input on lesson planning. Can I just say, in two years, not a teacher in my building has missed art, because of the accountability that comes with the wiki. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? OK, so, how many websites have their own search engine? And wikis are so about sharing and not competing - what this century needs to keep the creativity alive that our students need to solve the problems of the future. I love the management of my wiki - checking page visits and analyzing necessary clean up. It’s kind of like a business - I want to sell some art teachers on my wiki by just being helpful and saving them some time. It’s all about sharing. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Through my wiki, I am making a heavy-hearted, true effort to keep creativity alive. My wiki is the best listening board I have. Not only do I use web 2.0 tools to keep me art teacher savvy, but with the posted lesson plans for my teachers, I am able to link lesson extensions for them to use in the classroom. With our 4th through 6th graders in computer classrooms, this has been well received by many of our students and produced increased meaning in their artwork. Many students access ART4cast from home - adding meaning to the site. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" First, when my computer crashed upgrading from Tiger to Leopard - everything important to me was on my wiki. Second, my 13 filing cabinets (full size and FULL) were struck with disaster. I didn’t even open them and no heartache - because I had my wiki. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "I’m so glad to see you finally grasping the skill of organization and simplifying your life. A good day spent is a day with you, because I always end the day more organized and with more to share with the world."

We always love day one of ISTE because it’s EduBloggerCon, the self-coordinated gathering of educational bloggers. This year we sat in on some great conversations starting with, appropriately enough, "Are Wikis Dead"? A provocative topic is always a good way to draw out opinion and experience and we heard both about how wikis are of real practical importance to many educators and also how new technologies are pushing forward people’s expectations of what wikis can and should be. Most of the other conversations we sat in on were opportunities for us to learn about the day to day challenges of the teachers we try to serve and as always we learned a huge amount. Thanks to Steve and his team for putting everything together and to everyone we listened to and especially those who introduced themselves to us with thanks and challenges. Read more about our presentation on Wednesday, party, and office hours all conference long. We’re also all over Twitter this weekend. You can find Adam as @wikispaces and James as @jbyers. You’ll also find lots of tweets under the event hashtag #iste10.

In late June, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a hearing on "Innovation in America: Opportunities and Obstacles." The result of this hearing was a renewed commitment to the promise of technology and innovation for the future of the United States. We like to think of wikis as a sort of magical multi-tool for building that future. Because they are such a simple, immediate tool for collaboration, they can be used for almost any application. And that is why we are very proud, although (with all due modesty) not entirely surprised, to learn that a Wikispaces wiki is playing a significant role in one of the Obama administration’s important Health IT projects: The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is an initiative for finding better and more secure ways to exchange relevant healthcare information among all the people who need it — between healthcare providers and healthcare consumers — in the interest of providing the best patient care possible. The NHIN Direct wiki is a forum for the collection of user stories and specifications and service descriptions. I suppose it goes without saying that this is an exciting time to be in technology, but I’ll say it anyway: This is an exciting time to be in technology.

It all seemed so simple in the beginning: You had your home page, and you made a few edits. Wrote some killer intro copy, added some pictures, maybe embedded a video or a recording of a welcome message. And, for a while, that was enough. Then, one day, you went and hit the New Page icon. The rush! The power! The endless possibilities! With that one click, you entered a world where your every need could be met. Where every project, every document and class and project could have a page all its own. Every student (or collaborator) was suddenly custodian of his (or her) own private URL that would take her (or him) right to that one, single page where all the work was. But, before long, those heady days gave way to sinking frustration and regret. Before you knew it, you had dozens, even hundreds, of pages in your wiki. What was a humble wiki organizer to do? Well, to begin with, you can set up Links to create master pages and subpages. Then you can edit your nav bar to provide simple navigation. Wikispaces doesn’t currently have a rigid page hierarchy. Instead, we’ve given you a whole mess of simple tools so that you can build a wiki architecture that suits the way you and your group work. Let’s take a look: Bring unruly pages in line First, take a deep breath. Then remember that you can always find a complete, alphabetical list of all the pages in your wiki at Manage Wiki > Pages. Now that you’ve had a chance to review the pages that already exist, it’s time to get them in order. Start another New Page. This is going to be your new master page, so give it a name that tells you exactly what it is: Math Lab Group Work, or Table of Contents. Add some explanatory text, images, videos, widgets — or not. Whatever you want. Using the Link icon, create links to your existing pages. Hit Save. Repeat as needed. Master your pages before they master you If the story above sounds like a fairy tale to you, then there’s still time. And you can start by creating a new master page. Create a New Page. As above, give it a name that tells you exactly what it is, like 2010 Newsletters. Create subpages by adding Links — see Sarah’s intro tutorial if you need pointers. Hit Save. Follow your links and start editing your shiny new subpages. Every time you need a new bunch of pages, just follow these same steps with a new master page. Or, if you find you want to arrange them in a different way, refer to the section above and change your links around. Pull your navigation together Just about now you’re probably noticing that all of your brilliant subpage architecture isn’t really being reflected in your navigation bar. That’s because, by default, we populated your nav bar with a Pagelist widget that lists the first ten pages on your wiki in alphabetical order. But never fear: it’s easy to change. Click the Edit Navigation link. Your navigation bar will open as if it were a normal wiki page. Delete the blue Pagelist widget box, and add in all the links you need, in exactly the order you need them to be. You can format the text if you want, or even add horizontal rules. Hit Save. Any time you want to change it again, just repeat these steps. And if you ever want the old Pagelist back, just Edit Navigation and replace all the contents with a Pagelist from the Widget icon menu. Know your tools You’ve already met some of the most valuable, versatile tools in your wiki navigation toolkit: Manage Wiki > Pages, New Page, the Link icon, and Edit Navigation. You might want to play around with some of the others: Tags. You can find out more about how to use tags in our previous tips and tricks blog post. Pagelist widget. This will put a list of all the pages on your wiki on any page, in alphabetical order, up to any number of pages you set, filterable by tag. Pageinclude widget. This will paste the entire contents of one wiki page into another. You can use it to create useful bits, like headers and footers, that you might want to use over and over in your wiki. If you’ve discovered a great trick for subpages and wiki navigation that we didn’t cover, let everyone know about it in the comments section below. Or, if you have a question or a problem you just can’t figure out, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Your Private Label site has unlimited wikis. And each one of those wikis has unlimited pages. And the more people use the site, the more pages and wikis you’re going to have, and the more information your site is going to hold, and, unfortunately, the more difficult it gets to access the single piece of information you are looking for at a given moment. Building navigation into your Private Label site will help: links, instructions, and the features of Wikispaces Private Label itself will give you everything you need to guide your users effortlessly through a wiki environment that works the way you need it to. What do we mean by "navigation"? Well, we mean a lot of things. There are some tools built right into Wikispaces Private Label that make it easy for users to find the wikis they need and move between them without too much confusion. And you, as site admin (or even as organizer of a single wiki), have resources for building road maps and setting up road signs to tell visitors where they are, where to go, and where to find the information they need. Simply put, "navigation," means all those things, all the constructs and tools, that help you and your users move around your site and find the information you need quickly and easily. Your www wiki as map The first place that people see when they visit your site is the www wiki, which makes it the perfect spot to put up a map. You’ll want to think about how people use your site, and what kind of map they need. You could give them an atlas (say, an alphabetical list of wikis), telling your users and guests everything that’s in your site, and what it connects to, and where to find it. Or you could put up a treasure map, showing only the most important parts of your site, and only enough direction to get them there. Or anything in between. The Link icon in your editor toolbar will let you link to any page in any wiki in your entire site. (Actually, you can even link to any anchor in any page in any wiki on your site, but that’s another blog post.) Link to the Home pages of wikis that people will want to see in their entirety. Or link to individual pages where your most valuable resources are posted. If you want more instruction about how to set up navigation within a single wiki, check out our blog post on subpages and wiki navigation. Membership as self-navigation But we don’t want you to feel like you have to do all the work. In Wikispaces, individual users have tools to build the navigation that’s the best fit for them. User Dashboard: When a logged-in user goes to their account dashboard, they will see a list of all their Favorite Wikis. Any wiki that the user is a member (or organizer) of is automatically added to this list, as is any wiki they edit and any wiki where they’ve joined a discussion. They can also add wikis to the list by typing them into the Add a Wiki to This List box. My Wikis: The green arrow at the top of every page is a quick menu of the user’s top 20 favorite wikis. All they have to do is move their mouse over that arrow, and pick the link from the list. That’s the general idea. If you’ve found some specific tricks for setting up navigation in your Private Label site, please let us know about them in the comments section below. And if you have questions about navigation that we haven’t answered, just shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

On Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 3 p.m. (PDT), we will be joined by Ken Ostermiller of the United Church of Christ for an informational Private Label webinar. Ken is running a very successful non-profit Private Label site, giving individuals a place to share their thoughts and experience as they build a reference for the entire community. He will show us how he uses his Private Label site to make writing more collaborative, and to provide a forum where even non-writers can contribute to the composition of a valuable resource on practices. And, just like always, we’ll be there to walk you through the basics of Wikispaces Private Label, to answer any questions you have, and to satisfy your curiosity about what this tool could be doing for you. All of that, at 3 p.m. PDT on July 22. So… are you coming?

Hi, my name is Julie, and I’m excited to be joining the Wikispaces team as the newest member of the software engineering group. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in linguistics, and it took me a few years to realize what I really wanted to do was write code. Outside of programming, I spend my time reading, knitting, and eating my way through the restaurants of San Francisco. I’m looking forward to doing what I can to make your site experience even better.

Michelle Harclerode, Lee County’s 2010 Elementary Media Specialist of the Year, started the BookTrailersforReaders.com wiki in July, 2009. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I am a storyteller at heart. Last year at this time I discovered both book trailers (short digital videos which promote reading a certain book) and the world of Wikispaces. As a teacher librarian from Diplomat Elementary School in Lee County, Florida, I was excited to introduce both students and teachers to all that I was learning. The Web 2.0 concepts were new to me, but I was inspired to create a useful site for my own school. Book trailers on a wiki that allowed for student discussion seemed to be a natural fit. Originally I designed the site to introduce Florida’s best book list, known as the Sunshine State Young Reader Award books. My wiki started book conversations that helped to connect not only our school, but our district and even beyond to 40 countries. The long-range goal was to eventually teach students to make their own book trailers. However, things moved much quicker and our students immediately wanted to get in on the act and produce their own trailers. Creating trailers that can be seen by the world was a hook that engaged both avid and reluctant readers. Wikispaces became our portal that easily allowed students to produce, present, and publish. They produce using digital video tools, they present their book knowledge, and they publish to the global community. Web 2.0 tools, like Wikispaces, excite the learning process and help students authentically relate to the world around them. When creating trailers or book blogging on the wiki, my students would not only be engaged and focused, but joyfully exclaim, "I love that the whole world gets to see what I just did." 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I love the ease of uploading videos (either through my file or embedded widget) and then precisely changing the size of the video by switching to wikitext editor. I am slowly learning to manipulate my pages with the wikitext editor and create pages with a slick, professional look. This feature is an example of the many choices you have with Wikispaces. And the ability to control these choices is also in my hands as well. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? The discussion tab with my various book trailer pages has provided a safe environment for student blogging at the elementary level. I have set the permissions to ensure this and receive emails as soon as a student blogs. When students create their own trailers, they also assume blog responsibility for their book, and of course I am still supervising. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Two different times come to mind. One AHA moment time came when a librarian from another school said, "I could never get my kids to try the Sunshine State books and then they watch one of your trailers and the books just fly off the shelves." With wikis you are truly reaching out in ways you may not even know. The second happens off and on, when students stop to tell me they are reading a new book and they are going to make me a trailer so great that I will have to put it on the wiki. It will be "wiki good." 5. If you could ask, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "This teacher librarian really cares about the story and will use all the creativity and tech-savvy tools she can to get kids to read. Michelle Harclerode knows a wiki is a way to make real connections happen and that teaching digital literacy matters."