Larry Bruce started the first Mr. Bruce’s History in July of 2007. In June of 2010, he updated to the current Mr. Bruce’s History wiki. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: Mr. Bruce’s History serves as the class website for my 9th grade U.S. History courses. But more than being a web site where course material and instruction can be disseminated and delivered, it serves as an online collaborative workspace — a community hall, of sorts, based on the shared goals of the course and of the students. Through Mr. Bruce’s History, students have access to an interactive class calendar, a curriculum guide based on the state content expectations and links to unit pages, a personal portfolio where they can post links to their work next to the content expectation that it is intended to address. Students also access class readings and participate in frequent discussions — all without leaving Mr. Bruce’s History! 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I would have to say templates. The key functions of our wiki is based on the quick creation employment of complex pages. Creating such pages from scratch every time would prove to be unwise, taking far more time than necessary. Rather, by having templates ready for the calendar pages, the student pages, reading assignment pages, and any student wiki project pages, the workload is greatly reduced by eliminating the menial editing and all pages are uniformly matched to the site. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? As we intensified our use of Wikispaces for course management and a collaborative workspace, we also used it in combination with Google Docs to embed small group note-taking/collaborative content resources. Where we wanted real-time collaboration, I embedded a Doc on the curriculum page for that content and posted the open link and we would go to town while reading. Watching students make connections without speaking was somewhat thrilling and it drove verbal conversation as well. Setting up things like this is so easy to do on the fly, that even if a portion of the class benefits, it can be set up on the spot by anyone in the classroom. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Yeah, that would have to be the first large asynchronous project that I did when teaching 8th grade U.S. History - The Big Kahuna. This project required students to work in collaborative pairs and asynchronous groups of four or more. They chose a topic from the Era of Expansion and Reform 1800-1850 that sparked their interest. These pairs would work with another pair in a different hour that chose the same topic. Pairs would produce a video on their topic and the group would construct a wiki page in which the videos would be embedded. Witnessing the pairs work in class and then communicate using email, wiki discussions, and wiki mail to collaborate with classmates outside their class was invigorating. It also generated conversations about History class outside the walls of my room. It fully utilized the purpose and design of Wikispaces and the outcome was better than I had anticipated. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I think my wiki would say that I put an emphasis on a well-designed online workspace. When I speak at conferences or to groups about wikis in the classroom (or about any aspect of an online web presence for teachers) the emphasis I make is on designing it around its intended purpose. If a teacher creates a web presence (blog, wiki, WordPress, etc.) without the forethought of what function it is intended to serve, then it will exist without one. I hope that the wiki designed for my U.S. History classes demonstrates what online collaborative workspaces look like at the intersection of form and function.

Wikispaces is 6 years old. We’re going strong, and we’re having a great time. Tomorrow we’re going to give you the numbers update we do every year to give you a sense of the scale of what we do. That’s always a lot of fun for us, and sometimes it’s a little shocking. There are a LOT of you out there. We spend time on a regular basis thinking about what success means to us. Specifically, we ask ourselves who we want to be and what we want to do as a company. It’s not just about numbers, whether they be membership numbers, activity numbers, or revenue numbers. It’s about ambition. We have the ambition to be innovative and efficient. Software is hard. At scale it’s very hard. Software at scale with a small team is really very hard. But it’s also fun and rewarding. We’re pretty good at this, we want to get even better. We have the ambition to treat everyone we serve not just well, but extremely well. We want our employees, our customers, and our users to feel that we have exceeded their expectations. After all, that’s the way we like to be treated. We have the ambition to serve more and more educators. We are reminded every day of our ability to help teachers and students. And that strengthens our commitment to expanding our presence in education, reaching more and more teachers, schools and universities, and having a positive impact on the education of students worldwide. We are privileged to live in a time where we are constrained by almost nothing. We have the ability to be clear, open, and honest in our communications, to build something of value and get it into the hands of millions. Why wouldn’t you feel ambitious at a time like this? Thank you for all of your help this past year. Onward and upward.

On our birthday, we like to take a look at how much Wikispaces activity has changed over the past year. It’s kind of like keeping a growth chart. And, in the past year, we have done a LOT of growing. Since our last birthday, we have grown to over 7 million Wikispaces users who have created more than 3 million wikis. And we know those wikis are great, because in the past year more than 115 million visitors have gone to those wikis and racked up 879 million pageviews. (Or, to put it another way, 0.88 billion pageviews.) In the past month, we’ve had nearly 17 million visitors with nearly 106 million pageviews. On March 2nd alone, those visitors made 209,207 edits in a single day - and on August 31st, we had the most active hour of the year, with 33,949 edits in a 60-minute window. We’ve also crossed a huge milestone in our support of education: we have given away over 1 million free wikis for K-12 and higher education. We are thrilled to support education at this scale. March 2011 March 2010 All-Time Registered Members 7,282,736 4,468,404 All-Time Wikis 3,081,875 1,804,063 Pageviews 879,098,490 642,412,469 Unique Visitors 115,523,326 71,808,285 30 Day Pageviews 105,762,167 74,673,090 30 Day Unique Visitors 16,755,241 8,804,730 We like to share these stats because it’s exciting to look at how much is happening in WIkispaces. Not just because the numbers are so big, but because the wikis, work, and learning they represent is awe-inspiring. So thank you for another wonderful year full of so many fantastic wikis. Pageview and visitor stats are from Google Analytics and are through March 15, 2011. Tell us what you think with an email to 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 March: Making sense of tragedy in Japan After the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami, many of you set up, shared, and contributed to wikis full of information and resources for helping: begoña b: "Journalist wall of shame/Journalist wall of honor(Muro dl vergüenza periodística/Muro dl honor periodístico) http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/" Robert Dillon: "My 8th graders are using the info they find from searching #prayforjapan and other hashtags to create http://disasterinjapan.wikispaces.com/" Nippon Time: "http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/" Mutia Kurniawati: "You’ve the Journalists Wall of Shame, now here’s for Some Good Journalism: http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/Some+Good+Journalism" Keiichi: "Just put up a wiki site, http://japanese-relief-resources.wikispaces.com/ please help edit and spread the word!" Lori Borgman: "For a pespective on the nuclear situation in Japan from a nuclear engineer and nice guy http://japannuclearsituation.wikispaces.com/" jean-louis oustric: "fukushima - home http://fukushima.wikispaces.com/ This is a public wiki about the ongoing nuclear crisis in japan." A sampling of cool wiki projects Every month we hear about exciting wiki projects. Here are just a few from March: Craig Kemp: "Hey everyone can you please spread the word about my class #wikispace and give us some feedback - http://weareroom1.wikispaces.com/Feedback" kditzler: "WOW! There are already 94 classes signed up! http://writeyourstory.wikispaces.com/ Still looking for classes to write a story in Spanish." Smithsonian: "Curious about what else we offer for social media? Here’s all the stuff that couldn’t fit in the @nytimes article http://ow.ly/4guJY" Jen Smith: "We are hoping to find schools to contribute, please RT or contact me if interested! http://aglobalhello.wikispaces.com/ #edtech #global ed" Valuable tools for Web 2.0 classrooms Here are some of the resources that you’ve been talking about this past month: Wesley Fryer: "Great video #pbl idea #mace11 Paper Slide Videos @commoncraft style! http://paperslide.wikispaces.com" OCM BOCES SLS: "ISTE’s 1 Tool at a Time webinar series Glogster Thurs 17th http://1toolatatime.wikispaces.com/" Suzie Vesper: "Just added a few new avatar tools to my wiki page. Anyone got anymore? http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Avatars" West Broward High: "Web_2_Oh_Tools - Fantastic Resources for projects: http://thedaringlibrarian.wikispaces.com/Web_2_Oh_Tools" Our free wikis for higher education We announced our free wikis for Higher Education in February. This month, some of you were still talking about it: The Thinking Stick: Wikispaces Extends Free Education Wikis to Higher-Ed Digital Writing, Digital Teaching: Wikispaces announces free wikis for higher ed Planeta Educativo: Wikispaces pro también gratis para educación superior Just a Tech Blog: Wikispaces Offering Free Wikis for Higher Ed JISC Digital Media: Wikispaces announces free wikis for HE and FE NetSquared: Free WikiSpaces Plus Accounts for K-12 and higher Education Institutions Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Free wikis for educators: K through 12 through PhD

We are very, very excited to announce your new and improved navigation bar. I’ll dive into the details in a second, but here are the three big reasons we think you’re going to be as excited as we are: You can sort your pages by tag into collapsible folders. You can drag and drop to rearrange pages — instead of editing the navigation bar or adding links by hand. All those pages you’ve flagged as Favorites are conveniently listed in your navigation bar. The new navigation bar is simpler and friendlier, and it is going to give you a whole new way to keep an eye on what’s happening in your wiki, without any tricky setup. Here’s what it’s going to look like: Which wikis get the new navigation bar? If you’ve ever edited the navigation bar on your wiki, you won’t see any changes and you won’t lose any of your hard work. But if you’ve never edited the navigation bar, or if you’re creating a new wiki, you will see the new navigation bar by default. How do I use it? If you are the organizer of a wiki, you can rearrange that wiki’s navigation bar. Your Navigation Options will let you decide which categories your navigation bar shows: just pages with a certain tag, or All pages in the wiki. Pages will be listed in the order they were created or in the order the tag was applied. But you can easily rearrange the order of pages or tags by simply dragging them to where you want them to be. You don’t have to hit edit, you don’t have to save. Just make the changes, and every visitor to your wiki will see the navigation bar the way it should be. If you’re visiting a wiki but you’re not the organizer, you still have some options for customizing the navigation bar. All the various folders can be expanded or collapsed, depending on which pages you need to access easily. Whenever you add a navigation bar tag to a page, it will be automatically added to the navigation bar. And any of the pages you flag as Favorites will appear at the top of the navigation bar every time you visit the wiki. I’m still not sure the default navigation bar works for me Not to worry. The new navigation bar gives you more freedom, not less. You can still edit your navigation bar like any page in your wiki (our navigation bar help page can give you some pointers. And if you find yourself feeling nostalgic for the old alphabetized list of pages, you can do that too: On the side bar, under the list of pages, click the edit navigation link. Delete anything that you may have added to your navigation bar. Click the Widget button in the toolbar. From the Widget menu, select List of Wiki Pages. If you want the home page to appear at the top of the list, check the Move Home Page to Top box. If you want the home page to appear alphabetically in the "H" position, leave the box unchecked. By default, we will list up to ten pages. You can change this number if you would like to list more (or fewer) pages. Click Embed Page List. Hit Save. I’ve customized my navigation bar in the past, but I want to give the new one a try That’s also easy: On the side bar, under the list of pages, click the edit navigation link. Delete anything that you may have added to your navigation bar. Click the Widget button in the toolbar. From the Widget menu, select Insert Navigation Widget. Click Insert Navigation Widget. Hit Save. We hope you enjoy the new navigation bar! If you have any questions or comments, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Cheryl Arnett and her students use their wikis to keep up with pen pals all over the globe. We asked her to tell us how she got started: I used to have pen pals from around the world for my class. After losing one great contact in Australia, I gave up on pen pals. When I first learned about wikis, that was the first use that came to mind! It made sense to create a website that we could all access and post to. Imagine how much more efficient it would be than email or, as we had done before, postal letters! I ended up on ePals and quickly found partners from several places around the world. We created our first wiki, wearepals.wikispaces.com, with first grade students. The children learned so much from each other! One of the teachers, Rawya Shatila, from Beirut, Lebanon, and I entered a contest with epals and were named Epals Ambassadors for the year based on our wiki. We then entered the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum with our wiki project and not only won the contest in the United States, but were able to attend a world-wide event in Capetown, South Africa in October of 2010. This year we created a new wiki for our second graders called joinhands.wikispaces.com. One of the greatest benefits to using a wiki for pen pals is the opportunity to assist teachers who are just learning about technology. My favorite moment came when I found an email from our partner teacher in Lusaka, Zambia. Her assistant had been trying to update a page when she erased it completely. Knowing pages could be restored, I went on the wiki and recreated the erased page. Little did I know that at that exact moment, my friends in Africa were also trying to fix the problem and the page magically reappeared! They did not know how that happened until they read a new email from me! Wikispaces is a wonderful way for children from around the world to become friends. My friend in Beirut and I like to say, "If children everywhere became friends when they were 6, maybe there would be less conflict and war in the world!"

Columbia University recently announced that their Wikispaces Private Label site just hit 20,000 users. Columbia began their journey with Wikispaces in 2007. Since then they’ve created over 1,700 course wikis, giving instructors a place to give more engaging assignments and build more dynamic class syllabi. "Wikispaces has been exceptional - always available and dedicated to supporting us," says Maurice Matiz, Vice Executive Director of Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. You can read about it in more detail in our case study of Columbia University. If you’re interested in finding out what Wikispaces Private Label could do for your university or organization, take a look or send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Last month we gave you a compact introduction to widgets. You said hi, shook hands, made a little small talk about the weather. But we just know that you and widgets are going to get along like gangbusters, once you get to know each other. So we’re taking some time to get you better acquainted. How you know you need widgets Maybe you found a really great wiki through one of your colleagues, or from Twitter, or right here on this blog. And while you were admiring that wiki, something caught your eye. Perhaps it was a list of visitors, showing their location on a rotating globe, or a Facebook "like" button. Or possibly you saw an embedded presentation that let you flip through slides without downloading anything or opening any new windows. These were all widgets. They didn’t take any coding or programming or special skills. And they’re out there, on the Web, ready for you to use. How you find the widgets you need There are literally thousands of widgets out there that do everything from helping you lose weight to letting you play Space Invaders, so finding the right one can be a bit overwhelming. Here a few simple steps to get you started. Keep your eyes open. Now that you know what you’re looking for, you can recognize all those cool widgets on wikis, Web sites, and blogs for what they are. A lot of the time, those cools widgets will be branded with the widget’s name (or even a link to the source), so you can easily look them up and add them to your own wikis. Hunt for Embed codes. Most of the Web 2.0 tools you already use and love can probably be embedded in your wiki. Take a close look at your settings, preferences, and options. Is there something that says, "Share," or "Embed," or "Post to your blog"? If so, there’s a good chance that same code will let you add it to your wiki. Search. Googling "wiki widgets" won’t do you much good — there are simply too many out there. But once you know what you want, you can narrow it down. Try "bookshelf widget," for example. Or "embed slideshow." (Just a note: There’s a lot of great stuff out there, but some widgets and widget sites may contain inappropriate content. So search safely.) Ask. Every really great wiki gets that way because someone puts a lot of effort and care into it. These people are experts, and they are often excited to talk about the work they’ve done. They may be happy to help, or they may be too busy. But it seldom hurts to ask — and to let them know that all their hard work is appreciated. And now — the good stuff We wish we could take you straight to exactly the right widget: that one perfect tool that will be the cherry on top of your wiki. But there are just too many projects and too many widgets. And there are new ones every day! Here are just a few to get you started. We know the Wikispaces community already uses (and loves) these guys: Glogster interactive online posters Voki talking avatars Prezi dynamic presentations Slideshare presentations, documents, and videos Feedjit live feeds of the traffic to your wiki ClustrMaps and RevolverMaps real-time global maps of visitors to your wiki Storybird sharable, illustrated storybooks Wordle word clouds That’s just a teaser, really. You can find a much, much bigger list at cooltoolsforschools. In fact, so many of you are collecting and sharing all these fantastic tools that we can’t really keep up. Every month in our roundup post, we try to gather just a few of your lists, libraries, and recommendations. Good luck!

Andrew Churches started the Educational Origami wiki in April of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: The Educational Origami wiki is a starting point for education. When I first published the wiki I was working on taking traditional teaching practice and fitting it into the wide range of tools that we have available to us. Since then it’s expanded to cover Bloom’s Digital taxonomy, a revision of Benjamin Bloom’s original work and then the later revision by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl. Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy takes these works and brings them in to the 21st Century. I use the wiki as a resource hub, where I and the others who contribute to the wiki can share resources on a wide range of technology and education based topics ranging from Pedagogy to Leadership and management. We have starter sheets for different technologies and rubrics for their use, plus links to readings that challenge the reader to think and question their teaching practice. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The discussion tool - there are so many great discussions and these help to shape my thinking. It’s a huge privilege to have people take the time to comment and suggest, I really appreciate the conversations. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? As a teacher, Wikispaces wikis are one of the most powerful tools in my teaching toolbox. While I use tools like Google documents with my students for collaboration, this is always a short duration task, but for anything that requires permanence I use a wiki. We have global projects that run between schools in 5 or 6 countries and are over two years in duration and the foundation of the projects is the shared wiki. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" My AHA moment came after I had started the wiki and at that stage it was a private wiki, where to edit you had to be a member. A colleague of mine encouraged me to open it up, to make it public, to invite collaboration. I trusted his advice and watched it grow from there. It’s great and so worthwhile. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I hope that it would say that as an educator and also about education is about sharing, openness, open doors, transparency and passion for learning.

On Wednesday, April 20, at 11 a.m. PDT (6 p.m. UTC) we will be holding a special webinar for people interested in Wikispaces Private Label for Higher Education. We want to show you the benefits of using wikis in college courses, and the terrific advantages of having coordinated central administration (including Single Sign-On) for your university. We’ll walk you through getting started, look at some inspiring use cases, and take the time to answer any questions you have about Wikispaces Private Label for Higher Education. Then, on Thursday, April 21, at 10 a.m. PDT (5 p.m. UTC) we will be holding another webinar to talk about Wikispaces Private Label for K-12. You will get a chance to see the advantages of an integrated wiki environment for your school or district, and see how easy it is to get started. These will be a great opportunities to learn all about Wikispaces for education. And it’s totally free. Sign up today.