A wiki is something that a whole bunch of people can be looking at, at the same time, from anywhere in the world. And those people can be reading the same things, and watching the same video clips, and following the same links, and, through the magic of the Discussion tab, sharing comments, all at the same time. Of course you already know this. And some of you have already figured out that you can use your wiki in conjunction with the web conferencing tools you already have, and conduct online seminars right from your wiki. So what would make more sense than using that capacity for presenting from a wiki to run your wiki training? Recently we put together this Professional Development wiki for educators and educational technologists who are looking for tools that will help them demonstrate how to use wikis, and to show what a powerful tool wikis can be. Even if you’re not an educator, though, you could adapt some of the talking points and activities to your own needs. If you want to give this presentation from your own wiki — or if you’ve developed other wiki presentation and training tools that you want to share with us — email us at help@wikispaces.com.

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from September: Canterbury Earthquake On September 4, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck the South Island of New Zealand. The earthquake-shakeup wiki was created in response to that, so everyone could share their stories, experiences, and ideas. Here are some of the comments that were posted to Twitter: Digistore: Digistore Earthquake Collection on http://earthquake-shakeup.wikispaces.com/Learning+about+Earthquakes Allanah K: If you want to help with earthquake relief for schools in Christchurch register your interest http://earthquake-shakeup.wikispaces.com/ Suzie Vesper: Join in Skype interviews with people from ChCh, NZ who experienced the 7.1 quake. Details on wiki page http://tinyurl.com/298r4vt Glogster Widget This month, we released a new widget that makes it easier to integrate glogs into your wikis. We announced it on September 9, but you all scooped us: GlogsterEDU: Spice up your Wikispaces with Glogs Free Technology for Teachers: Wikispaces Makes it Easier to Embed Glogs The Unquiet Library: Mrs. Frost and Freshmen Master the Art of the Glogster Widget in Wikispaces! Resources for Teachers It looks like a lot of you are using wikis to share your techniques and favorite resources. Here a few that you tweeted about: David Wilcox: Social media training with @stephendale and amazed yet again by his great online resource http://socialmediatoolkit.wikispaces.com/ Saitech Informatics: http://50ideas.wikispaces.com/Science+Websites Jamie Menning Regier: Fantastic Teaching Resources! http://21stcenturyconcepts.wikispaces.com/ Cool Projects And, of course, as much as it’s never a surprise to learn that you’re doing cool things with wikis, it’s always a blast to see those projects first-hand. Here are a few that you shared with the world: Community News of Virginia: Campbell County announces first "Campbell County Reads" program kditzler: WOW! I already have 8 classes signed up for the Fall Progressive Story Project: http://writeyourstory.wikispaces.com/ Want to join us? Dorie Glynn: Global Project: The Green School Project http://newsproject.wikispaces.com/Green+School+Project #edchat #elemchat Colette Cassinelli: Join a collaborative YA book project Go to http://10-10-10.wikispaces.com/ to nominate your top ten YA novels - a great class project! We’re already excited about October!

The EWU Career wiki is a valuable online resource for Eastern Washington University students and alumni — and it’s a beautiful wiki with a sense of fun. We asked Dan Martensen to tell us about it. The Eastern Washington University (EWU) career wiki is a collaboration between EWU Libraries and EWU Career services to create a one-stop-shopping experience for students and alumni looking for career-related information online. The project was funded through a Renew Washington grant of the Washington State Library using funds from the Institute of Museum & Library Services. Two goals for the wiki’s content and design were to select quality career resources relevant and available to our audiences and to present the wiki resources in a highly usable and appealing format. After systematically evaluating various wiki platforms available, we chose Wikispaces for its customization, storage capacity, security, and cost-effectiveness. The project team, made up of two EWU students hired with grant funds, brainstormed college-oriented themes for the wiki design. Ninety minutes into our whiteboard brainstorm session, one of those "Ah ha" moments occurred—and we hit upon the idea of using a smart phone interface as the design metaphor. Smart phones are similar to our wiki: collaborative, dynamic, visually attractive, and easy to use. On the technical side, wikis and smart phones both use a graphic interface, are organized with sub pages, and enable tremendous creativity. Project stakeholders (managers from the library and Career Services) loved the design idea. My coworker and I developed the wiki over the next few months. Having a background in graphic design, my coworker created the "app" icons full of rich colors and textures, as well as built the "phone" framework of the wiki using HTML and CSS. I selected and organized the content, incorporating internal and external links. The success of our project hinged upon a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, use of graphic design software, and the willingness to go back to the drawing board repeatedly. I hope our wiki encourages more innovative design ideas using Wikispaces’ custom themes.

You started your wiki for a reason. Maybe you were looking for ways to get your students more excited about their work. Or you wanted a place to post announcements for your community. Or possibly you needed a spot to organize a really important event. No matter what your specific reason was, you chose a wiki because you knew it was a collaborative tool, and that was what you wanted. The main thing about collaborative tools is that you need them when you’re working with other people. And, if you’re working with other people, odds are you’ve found yourself asking how those other people are using the wiki. And that moment, when you ask that question, is when you are ready to check out your wiki stats. What exactly are "wiki stats"? Numbers. Fabulous, fabulous numbers. The kinds of numbers that tell you how many people visited your wiki, and which pages they looked at, and how many edits they made, and what countries they came from. To see what I mean, go to Manage Wiki > Wiki Statistics. There you’ll see a bunch of graphs, with lots of fun information: Views Unique visitors Edits Messages Editors Top 10 countries by percentage of visits When you get to this page, you’ll be looking at the numbers for the current month, but you can always change the dates to see the data for a different month — or even for an entire year. And any of the information you see here — and of the information anywhere in your wiki stats — can be downloaded as a .csv (comma separated value) file. Neat. What else can I do? Click on the Pages tab. Now you get a little more detail about how people are using your site. This is a list of all the pages in your wiki, and how many times they’ve been viewed. And, just like the wiki stats overview tab, you can change the date range (and download a .csv file), so you get all the information you need. Next, click the Members tab. Now you’re looking at all the members of your wiki, and you get to see how many edits they’ve made and how many messages they’ve left. Click on any number, and you’ll see a list of all the edits or posts the the member made within the dates you entered. That’s a lot of great information, but what can I do with it? That part depends on what you want to do with your wiki. If you’re a teacher, these numbers will help you monitor individual students. You can dig a little deeper into how they’re working and behaving on the wiki, and it gives you a way to evaluate students and the work they do over a semester. If you’re organizing a large event — say, a conference, or a gala event — wiki stats will let you see activity on the wiki as soon as it goes live. You can see how many visitors you’re getting, which pages they’re interested in, even which countries they’re coming from. Or let’s say you have a really big wiki, and you’re reevaluating how you use it. Wiki stats make it easy to see which pages are the most important for your community — just check out the number of views on the Pages tab. Whatever it is you use your wiki to do, knowing how to read your wiki statistics can help you get a clearer picture of how it’s working. If you want to know more about your stats, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

On Tuesday, October 26, 2010 from 1-2 p.m. PDT, we’re holding a down and dirty Private Label webinar. No frills, no extras: just one hour with our Private Label experts. We’ll take the product through its paces, so you get a chance to see how it works and how you can make it do whatever your organization needs from a wiki environment. And, of course, we’ll be ready to answer all your questions about Wikispaces Private Label for organizations. Pound for pound, it’s just about the best value you can get from a free webinar. If you’re still making up your mind about what to do on October 26, you should sign up today.

If communication isn’t the key to success, it certainly is key to success. And that’s why we’ve recently added a site mailing feature to every Wikispaces Private Label site. Here’s how it works: Go to Site Administration. On the Users tab, you’ll find a link that says Send Email to Site Users. Click it. This will take you to the main site mailings page, where you’ll find a list of all the site emails that have been sent, and their status (the most recent mailing will always be on top). You can also draft a new mailing when you hit the Add New button. Your first decision with a new mailing is who’s going to receive it. These are your options: All users: The email will be sent to everyone with an account on your site. All members of any wiki: The email will be sent to anyone who is listed as a member of any wiki on the site. Organizers: The email will be sent to all of your wiki organizers. Site administrators: The email will only be sent to site administrators. Yourself (for testing): No one will see the email but you. (Your email will only be sent to confirmed email addresses — so make sure that your users are confirming their email addresses on your site.) Enter the subject line and body like you would for any other email. Review your work with the Preview button, then you can Start Mailing, Continue Editing, or just Cancel. And that’s it! It’s a simple but effective tool for keeping your users up to date on important site information. As always, if you have any questions, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Joyce Valenza started the Copyrightfriendly wiki in August of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I use the Copyright Friendly pathfinder to support student and teacher media creation. Our students are deeply involved in digital storytelling and sharing the results of their research in media. They need access to the quickly growing number of portals of copyleft and public domain images, music, sound effects and video. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Although I haven’t used it much in this particular wiki, I embed like crazy in most of my other wikis. (See our Virtual Library.) That little embed icon is my personal favorite and a happy spot for most of our learners too. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Our students are using wikis as parking lots/looseleaf notebooks for their major research projects. (See this blog post.) Wikis allow students to gather and store media of all types — including their video reflections on the process, their final knowledge products — and they allow for transparency and interactivity. Wikis seem to be our basic building platform for aggregating so many of the other 2.0 tools — glogs, digital stories, online calendars, polls, RSS feeds, and so much more. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I said it today when Allison discovered she could easily embed feeds from soldiers’ blogs in Afghanistan to help support her research and her cigar drive in honor of her older brother who returns soon. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Go to sleep, Joyce!

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from October: Books, Libraries, and Reading It’s October, which means that it’s just turned cold and drizzly here in San Francisco. Perfect book weather. It sounds like a lot of you were thinking the same thing: edtech VISION: Got books? Promoting YA literature using Technology Naomi Harm: "Bookleads http://bookleads.wikispaces.com/ and Reading 2.0 http://readingtech.wikispaces.com the power of story into your classroom #edtech" Steven V. Kaszynski: "Webinar: Brick and Mortar School Libraries in the Digital Age http://tlvirtualcafe.wikispaces.com/Changed+But+Still+Critical #libraries" Emma: "Book club is updated and ready to go for October. Great time to join: http://missprint.wikispaces.com/" International Projects Part of what makes wikis so neat is that you don’t have to be in the same locality to work together. Here are some of the awesome projects you’ve been talking about that are built on the idea of international collaboration: Autumn Scheer: "Check out http://greetingsfromtheworld.wikispaces.com for some really cool glogsters about other cultures. Croatia is very beautiful!" Fiona McDonald: "@CorrieB awesome, add your name http://globalmythchallenge.wikispaces.com/" Art and Graphics Sometimes you need beautiful graphics to add clarity and communicate. Sometimes you just want to waste a few minutes (or hours) looking at something pretty. In both of those times, these wikis are there for you: Peter Vogel: "A wikispaces collection of art and drawing resources sites: http://bit.ly/83MlhB" Julie Rogier: "Excellent resource to save: free online tools and devices compiled by a fellow #MSU Spartan http://freevisualtools.wikispaces.com/" Resources for Teachers We love educators, and we love the way you share your thoughts, references, and experiences. We wanted to pass on a just a few that we’ve run across this month: bcnpaul1′s blog: teaching in a barefoot world - teaching journal part 1 NJ Tech Teacher Musings: Social Media Benefits Mike Mcilveen: "@msjweir Thx! http://teachmath20.wikispaces.com/ is amazing! Will retweet and distribute. #math" Cammy Monroy: "Found a great wiki with lots of links to free technology tools for use in the classroom: http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/" Rochelle Jensen: "thanks to the authors of http://owt.wikispaces.com/ Great ideas to support the writing process" Happy October (and November) everyone! We’re off to curl up with a cup of cocoa.

The TwitterEd wiki is an online resource for educators interested in using Twitter as a teaching tool. We asked Shireen Richardson to tell us about it: The "Twittered" wiki was set up following a Masters of Education unit, "New Technologies in Education and Training." It was my component of a group project titled "Social Networking in Schools," and was a huge learning curve for me. For a start, although I volunteered to look at using Twitter in education, I didn’t have a Twitter account, knew very little about Twitter, and had never used it before! (I have to give a lot of credit to Carol Cooper-Taylor, as it was her excellent YouTube clip, "Tweaking Twitter for Teachers," that gave me my first understanding of Twitter.) The group began by working in Google Docs, another "first" for me. Then, when the project became too large to manage, a wiki was established for ease of communication, organization, and collaboration. I had never used a wiki before. What I instantly loved about using a wiki was how easy it was to use and the fact that you could find really clear help topics and tutorials on what you wanted to do, as the need arose. Sadly, the group I was working with chose to submit the assignment in the form of a PowerPoint, with slides on each of the social networking components. Personally, I would have liked to have polished and submitted the wiki that we had used for collaboration. When the project was over, I thought it was a pity that work I had done would no longer have a purpose, hence the wiki "Twittered." Most recently, I have completed another study. For this, I have been working on extending my ICT knowledge and skills further by investigating how wikis can be used in literacy to engage students in text studies. I introduced my year 7 English students to wikis, which they have been using in response to their text, Chinese Cinderella. This project has been extremely successful. Every lesson, students ask if they can work on their wikis (almost beg!) and have even spent their after school time voluntarily working on them. For this study, I was required to produce and deliver a professional development session to colleagues, using PowerPoint. This has resulted in colleagues eagerly wanting to use wikis in their classes. Whilst constructing the PowerPoint, I was aware that if I had a choice of delivery, it would in fact be using a wiki and not PowerPoint. Therefore, I set up a wiki that could be used in future presentations or for colleagues wanting to revisit information from the session.

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 from 3-4 p.m. PST (11 PM-12 AM UTC), join our very own Sarah Cove for an information webinar on Wikispaces Private Label. Sarah’s prepared some examples of popular uses for wikis in education, business, and nonprofits. And she’s really excited about the Q&A session, where you can test her knowledge with any and all questions about Private Label sites, from features to function to formatting. It’s bound to be illuminating, and fun. If you’re free on November 10, you should go ahead and sign up today.