On Tuesday, February 15, at 11 a.m. PST (7 p.m. UTC) we will be hosting a Private Label webinar. We are very pleased to be joined by Connie Lindsey of Education Service Center Region XV. Connie runs a professional development Private Label site, and will be showing us how she uses her site to get important information and tools to educators across multiple rural districts in Texas. This will be a great chance to look at how technology — and Wikispaces Private Label — are changing the face of education. We’ll be there on February 15. Won’t you join us? Sign up today.

Lisa Dabbs moderates the weekly #ntchat for new teachers on Twitter. The New Teacher Chat wiki is an archive of those conversations — and a valuable resource for new teachers. We asked her to tell us about it: As an Educational Consultant and former school Principal, I’m passionate about the need to mentor and support new teachers. In early 2009, as a consultant I became very involved in the use of Social Media to support educational reform. So I created my Twitter handle and joined the stream! I observed the chats for educators on Twitter and began to participate in #edchat. I observed that at the end of the chat the tweets were "archived" in a collaborative workspace to keep the tweets for all to review. After participating in many #edchats, I discovered that there wasn’t a chat to support new teachers. I was shocked, but after 4 months of preparation, on Wed May 5th 2010, I launched the New Teacher Chat on Twitter. I’m the creator and moderator of the chat and hashtag #ntchat. The chat was met with great excitement! As #ntchat developed, I knew that I wanted to archive the tweets to provide opportunity for reflection on the conversations and resources shared. After looking at several applications, I choose Wikispaces, and I’m glad I did! In creating the New Teacher Chat Wiki, as a novice Wikispaces user, I took the time to watch the helpful videos and interact with other wikis used for educational collaboration. It took me 5 hours to design the wikispace for New Teacher Chat! It was a labor of love and worth the time and effort. I particularly loved that I could customize it to reflect my enthusiasm for #ntchat. I love that I can not only archive the chat, but also add supportive resources, links and videos in pages and navigation bar. Recently I added a Voki! I’m excited to see how my New Teacher Chat Wiki develops. I plan to continue to add links and resources in the coming months as #ntchat grows. I’m even hoping to get sponsorship to move my Wiki to the next level! Thanks Wikispaces team for your support and great product!

James and Adam are all packed up for PETE&C in Hershey, Pennsylvania. If you plan on being there, you should stop by the Social Networking Lounge to say hi. You can be absolutely sure to find them there from 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. on Monday (Feb 14) and from 2:15 - 3:15 p.m. Tuesday (Feb 15) — but they should be around for a lot of the conference. If you’d like to talk to us during the show, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com and we’ll make sure to find time to chat. We’d love to hear about your experiences with Wikispaces, what you’d like to see from us in the future, and to share some of our plans with you. One of the big things we’re excited about this year is our new partnership with PAIUnet, which gives us an excuse to provide discounts to all schools and districts in Pennsylvania. Very exciting! Hope to see you there!

One of the most common questions we get is also one of the hardest to answer: How do I make my wiki look good? Of course there’s no one simple trick for attractive wikis. The best advice we can give you is to get in there and play with it — and to be inspired by all the wonderful wikis that your colleagues have already made. So, instead of giving you a how-to, we wanted to highlight some of the simplest tools you’ve got, and how you can use them to make your wiki shine. 1. Headings Clear, clean pages are always appealing. And the simplest way to set up clear sections in your wiki page is to use preformatted headings. When you set a line as a heading (from Heading 1 through Heading 6) it will be made larger and bolder than the rest of the page. And, more than that, setting up headings lets you add a Table of Contents widget to the top of your page, so it’s even easier for visitors to read and navigate your page. 2. Fonts A little more complicated than Headings — and a lot more fun! — are all your options for fonts. Spend some time with your Style Text tool. I promise you won’t regret it. Not only can you change the font itself (to Times New Roman, Comic Sans, and many more), you also can adjust the size, alignment, position, and color. You can modify a whole paragraph or line of text, or just one word, or even a single letter at a time. These are all fantastic options, and tweaking them can make a huge difference to your page. But I have to admit to having a favorite, and that’s changing the color. If you know the hexadecimal value of your favorite color, you can just type it into the Text Color field. For the rest of us, there’s a handy-dandy color picker. The outside circle lets you pick color, then the inside square lets you adjust the value (that is, how much white, black, or gray is added to the color you’ve chosen). Just play around until the preview displays the color you want. You can set the Background Color the same way you chose a font color. This won’t change the color of the whole page. Instead, it creates a solid stripe behind the text you’ve selected, like you’ve gone over it with a highlighter in any color you choose. 3. Horizontal Rules Some people never use horizontal rules. I love them. Just one button (click!), and you’ve added a tidy separation between two sections of your page. You can put them above your section headings to serve as a section break. Or you can put it right below the heading as a graphic element. Or you can put one above and one below to make a stripe with your heading inside it. 4. Images Of the simple editor tools, this is probably the one with the biggest impact. Even a single image can make a huge change to the way your page looks and feels. So of course it’s important to choose the right images, and to format and crop them correctly. But, assuming you already have images that you’re happy with, you should also get familiar with your options for adding them to a page. That means adjusting the size of the image, adding a caption, even turning it into a link. You can also change the alignment of an image. By default, an image has no alignment, which means that it gets treated more or less like a really big letter, in line with the other letters around it. If you center align an image, it will be centered on its own line. And if you change its alignment to the left or right, the rest of your text will wrap around it, like a picture in a magazine or a textbook. This is the heart of a wiki: simple tools that anyone can use. But they give you nearly infinite options for building beautiful, impressive wiki pages. If you’ve built pages you’re proud of, share them in the comments below, or send us an email at help@wikispaces.com so we can take a look!

Tom Strongman started the MindDrive wiki in January of 2010. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: Our Wiki has played a key role in telling our story, which has received worldwide attention. We began as a group of seven at-risk students and 11 adult mentors from DeLaSalle High School in Kansas City, and our goal was to convert an old Lola Indy car to electric power, to design a lightweight full-coverage body for it, and to measure how efficient we could make it. The class met for four hours every Saturday morning for eight months. Our Wiki enabled me to document the class and post weekly updates so that all mentors, students, and school officials could keep abreast of our work. As the project developed, we attracted the attention of a couple of major corporate sponsors, and the Wiki played a key role by letting them follow our progress on a weekly basis. Bridgestone invited us to bring the car to their proving grounds in Ft. Stockton, TX for testing in August. The efficiency of our electric powertrain equaled 300 miles-per-gallon at 42 mph and 443 MPGe at 25 mph. The car was a sensational success. The news of our achievement spread quickly around the world, and we were featured on more than 300 websites, TV shows, and magazines. Once people saw our story, they would come to the Wiki to read a detailed version. We formed MINDDRIVE as a non-profit organization to continue the class with more students in the future. We have been invited to bring our car to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May for Emerging Technology Day. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Besides the Edit button, I like being able to embed widgets because I publish videos and slideshows. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? I use the Wiki as a way to tell our story with pleasing graphics and photography. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" When we received inquiries from India, Germany and the Ukraine, I realized that the Wiki made that happen. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Our Wiki would say that our diverse group has been about transformation and vision. We learned that every one of us has a unique gift of creativity and ingenuity, and that learning from each other is the basis for our success. The car became a beautiful metaphor for the group: not only does the skin have no color, but its transparency enables us to focus on what’s inside, and it’s what inside each of us that counts the most.

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 February: Free Wikis for Higher Education Yep, you read that right. Free wikis — ad-free, full-featured Wikispaces wikis — are now free for higher education, as well as K-12 education. We’ll have more to say about that in a bit. In the meantime, take a look at what everyone else is saying: Steve Hargadon: New Wikispaces Ad-free Program for Higher Education Free Technology for Teachers: Wikispaces Now Offers Free Wikis to Higher Ed NeverEndingSearch: Wikispaces goes to college, gets even better, and stays FREE! CogDogBlog: Yee Ha! Wikispaces Rolling our Free Ones for Higher Education The Whiteboard Blog: Wikispaces to extend free wikis to Higher Ed Hack Education: Wikispaces Extends Its Free Wikis for Educators from K-12 to Higher Ed Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: The Best Free Wiki - Now MORE Available for Higher Ed and K-12 @wikispaces #edchat YourCampus360: "Have you gotten your Free Wiki for Higher Ed Users? Pretty cool: http://bit.ly/fytSYG #highered #wiki" awyatt: "Just requested a complimentary upgrade to course wiki from @wikispaces! Thanks! http://www.wikispaces.com/content/for/highered" Janine Lim: "so excited that #wikispaces is giving away plus wikis to higher education now too!! yay for a company investing in education!" Web 2.0 in the Classroom Every month, you guys are building more and better uses of technology in the classroom. These are just a few of the resources and projects you were talking about in February: Malden Observer, Malden, MA: Learning history in the 21st century Deb Langford: "web2 classroom tools - one of my favourite sites http://webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com/" Jamie Burdon: "A useful HOW TO site for Google Apps. Includes videos. http://googletools.barrow.wikispaces.net/ #spneps" Steven W. Anderson: "Did you know the Did You Know Videos from @mcleod and @karlfisch have a wiki? Yep. Good stuff: http://bit.ly/gQACsl #edtech" Collaborative Projects Wikis are all about collaboration. Here are a few of the open projects out there reaching out to the world community. Check them out, and get involved! Jim Noble: "http://internationalstudentsurvey.wikispaces.com/ Collaborative stats project. Please participate, please help us spread the word! Thanks" Amanda Helmkamp: "@karacornejo @gilmorekendra This is a wiki for teachers to have others comment on their student blogs http://bit.ly/W3csi" kditzler: "Registration for the Progressive Story Project is now open: http://writeyourstory.wikispaces.com/" PETE&C In the middle of February, we went to Hershey, PA to attend PETE&C. We had a blast. Fortunately for those of you who couldn’t make it, many of the presenters and attendees wanted to share: Kathy Fiedler: "http://tech4di.wikispaces.com/ is a new resource for me. Thank you! #PETEC2011 #LL07″ Shighla Jackson: "My head is spinning. iLIfe is amazing. Taking notes as fast as possible. http://crsd.wikispaces.com/iLife #petec2011″ Jimbo Lamb: "Find info on my #petec2011 presentation here: http://misterlamb.wikispaces.com/PETE&C+2011" Brandon Lutz: "If you missed 60 in 60 here is the wiki http://60in60.wikispaces.com/ , click on PETE&C 2.15.11 under upcoming presentations!" Dorothy Noll: "Patti just showed 101 Math & Science resources in under 1 minute: duncanpatti.wikispaces.com" J. Camille Dempsey: "Co-presenting, iPads, Inquiry, & PD at PETE&C at 11:30 AM today: http://artseducator20.wikispaces.com/PETE%26C+2011 #petec2011″ Rich Kiker: "http://bit.ly/fMhJE5 Very useful wiki on iPads in education from @rboltz & @amyjshoemaker #petec2011 #1to1″ Cheryl Capozzoli: "Getting Ready for My PETEC Pres. http://web20guru.wikispaces.com/PETE%26C+2011 http://fb.me/KJFHJUVV" khornberger: "Great copyright tool from yesterday’s CFF session http://copyrightconfusion.wikispaces.com/Reasoning #petec11″

Starting this month, Wikispaces is offering free wikis to higher education. It’s the logical next step for us, all things considered. Where it started Over five years ago, we had what we thought was a great idea: take 100,000 of our wikis, make them ad-free and private, and load them up with our great Plus features, then give them away — for free — to K-12 educators. That went so well, we decided to give away 250,000 more. After that, we just kept going and going. As I’m writing this, we’ve given away 980,000 free classroom wikis for K-12 education. This has been good for educators, who need a simple, powerful way to write and work on the Internet. And it’s been really good for us, because it gets our wikis into the hands of the people who need them the most. How it’s changing We’re taking it to the next level. Our great ad-free, private, Plus-featured wikis are now free to higher education, as well. With this whole new audience for our wikis, we’re extending our commitment to give away 2 million total free wikis for education. The features in these free educational wikis normally cost $50 per year, but are completely free when used for K-12 or higher education. That means wikis for teachers, students, professors, researchers, librarians — anyone and everyone using their wikis in K-12 or higher education. So spread the word and let’s achieve something great together. If you’re using your wiki exclusively for K-12 education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information here. If you’re using your wiki exclusively for Higher Education, find out how to upgrade your wiki and get lots of other great information here. What’s next Expanding our free wiki program is a crucial first step in changing how we think about wikis for educators. Over the next year — and beyond — we are planning to develop and release some of the tools and features that educators request most often. Plus a few that we just think will be cool. All still free, ad-free and private, because we believe that educators deserve it.

Through the recent tragedies in Australia, the Fitzroy Oxfam Group’s Disaster Relief Australia wiki has been connecting people in need with donors who want to help. It’s a truly inspirational undertaking. Wiki co-founder, Fitzroy Oxfam Group’s Brian Moran told us more about it: When a disaster happens in Australia like the Victorian bush fires and the recent Queensland floods there is an immediate outpouring of generosity in the local community and an equally strong immediate need for practical assistance by those who are suffering. Wiki has provided us with an instant way to connect both parties without the bureaucracy, time lag or bottlenecks. It’s so simple that I can’t believe others had not thought of using a Wiki community notice board concept to immediately connect these two parties in a crisis situation. Within hours of the Victorian bush fires Craig Reardon from TheETeam, craig@theeteam.com.au , and I set up a Wiki site and emailed out a media release. The media immediately picked up on the concept and we had 24,000 hits in a few days as this site offered immediate relief to thousands. When the Red Cross, and other charitable organizations could not cope with the offers to help they immediately referred donors and sufferers to our Wiki site. The most telling call was from an Australian Government department Lawyer saying to me "we don’t know how you have done this so easily and quickly but your unique idea is working like a treat and solving so many of the logistical problems many of our departments are struggling with. Don’t quote my name or my department but we will give you all the support you need as your goods and services register is providing such a vital service. So just click on www.wikifloods.com.au and see how simply it works. Let’s say you are a generous soul on high ground in Brisbane and you have an empty caravan in your back yard that you want to loan to a sufferer for a few months. Log on to the site and list what you have to offer with your phone number and my guess is you will have got a phone call within minutes from someone needing it. You sort out the logistics of delivery between you both and an accommodation problem for a family is solved almost immediately. (On our Victorian bush fries site 4WD Club members listed their offer to move caravans within 100 km free of charge.) It’s peer to peer, no bureaucracy, time lag or bottlenecks. Imagine the time, resources, paperwork and labour this above offer would have taken a charity/government department to sort out. In a digital age let’s have digital solution. The site facilitated air drops of food and medicine by another generous soul offering use of his ultra-light. And it’s not just offers of goods, like furniture, bedding, and food but labor, stock agistment, transport and even professional services are listed as well. The site is beginning to empty out now and an empty site is a sign of great success to us! We have spent many hours refining the concept and we know it works well so we are now ready to offer it as an essential tool in any crisis situation anywhere in the world. Brian Moran OAM Chair Fitzroy Oxfam Group. briangum@tpg.com.au Note : Between the time that Brian sent me this post and I hit Publish, tragedy struck Christchurch, New Zealand. If you need help, would like to donate, or just want to learn more, go to http://disasterreliefnz.wikispaces.com/. —Carole

On Wednesday, March 16, at 3 p.m. PDT (10 p.m. UTC), we’ll be holding a Private Label training webinar for site administrators, wiki organizers, and anyone curious about Wikispaces Private Label. The one and only Sarah Cove will be hosting, and she has some wonderful use cases, features, and tricks to share with you all. And, naturally, she’ll be concluding with a Q&A session, so you get a chance to drive the conversation, too. The webinar will be one hour long, and it’s totally free. Why don’t you sign up today?

Last month, we gave you a quick rundown of your most basic tools for formatting a wiki page. This month, we wanted to give you an introduction to one of the all-time most popular wiki tools: widgets. Widgets: A Primer A "widget" is any piece of media or dynamic content that you can embed into a wiki page. It could be anything from a table of contents to a video to a playable Flash game. It’s also a great way to make your wiki more engaging, relevant, and fun! Wikispaces Widgets When you click the widget icon in your toolbar, the first thing you see is a list of Wikispaces Widgets. We built these tools to make it easy for you to add certain types of formatting and wiki-specific information to your pages. For example, this is how you’d add a table of contents, or a reference (a "reference" is like a footnote for your page), or a special character. Some of these widgets make it easier to navigate your wiki. For example, you can add an alphabetical List of Wiki Pages, and even narrow the list to only pages with a certain tag. Or you can add a List of Links to a Page, and provide a little backwards navigation. Or, if you are working in a Private Label site or if you have a whole bunch of single wikis, you can add a List of Wikis to any page on any of your wikis. Documents, Presentations, and Other Popular Media Chances are you’re already using other Web 2.0 tools in your projects or coursework. One of the most popular is Glogster, which lets you create and publish rich, dynamic online posters. Our users love Glogster so much that we recently built a special widget to make adding them to wikis even easier. It’s easy to add other content, too: videos from YouTube and TeacherTube, presentations and slideshows from Flickr and Scribd, Google Docs and Google Calendars, RSS feeds, even Skype chat. We have a list of widgets on our help page — but as long as you have the embed code, you can add any widget from anywhere to any page on your wiki. How It’s Done Go to the page of your wiki that needs a widget. Hit the Edit button. Place the cursor where you want the widget to go, then click the Widget icon (it looks like a little TV). Select the type of widget you want from the menu. If you’re using a Wikispaces Widget or one of the popular media or widgets that we’ve listed for you, just follow the instructions on the screen. If you want to add other media or widgets, select Other HTML and paste the embed code into the field (you can usually find the code in a text box labeled "embed," "embed HTML," "add to my site/blog," or something similar. Hit Save. Save the page. And that’s it! More About Widgets You probably see widgets every day, on web sites, blogs, and other wikis. And there’s no reason not to use those great tools — and get the same great impact — on your own wiki. If you already have tools you love or media you admire, take a look around for that embed code. It can probably be yours with a simple cut and paste. But that’s not all. In fact, we have so much to say about widgets that it wouldn’t all fit in one blog post. So be sure to check back for the April tips and tricks, and Part II of Widgets.