We get so inspired working with our users every day and seeing the amazing ways they organize their online world. We’ve highlighted a few sites and tips below. We think you’ll love them and leave feeling inspired. Add a Custom Logo Adding a custom logo is an easy way to noticeably improve the look of your site. Brendan Flynn, a Wikispaces Private Label customer from Bristol-Plymouth Regional Technical School, has helped teachers across his district create wikis. He shared his experience with us: "When it comes to designing logos, less is more. I always tell students to design logos first in just black and white. Take color out of the equation." Banner-like logos - i.e. narrow logos that span the top of the wiki - are a great way to go. You can take full advantage of the space at the top of your page. You may also want to consider adding a transparent background to your logo as Brendan has. This way, your logo can blend in with your existing background. There’s plenty of software out there to do it, but two free and easy ones are Google Drawings and Pixlr. Read more about adding a logo to your homepage and let us know how yours ends up. (Note: if you have a lot of wikis in your organization, using our Private Label service comes in handy here as well. You can assign your school logo to the top of every school wiki by default.) Add a Welcome Message The front page of your Wikispaces wiki or the Home wiki on your Private Label site is important real estate. It’s the first thing your users see, so we encourage users to take time to edit it and welcome folks stopping by. Coonara Community House Training in Melbourne, Australia has done an excellent job of this. Their home page has a simple welcome message describing the goals of the site, their contact information in case anyone needs to reach them, and a picture to spruce up their site. You may also want to check out their Ementor wiki. There they share specific information about who they are and how their visitors can use and navigate the wiki. And with a few small changes - a great color scheme and an embedded Voki widget - their wiki became a fun place to visit. We spoke with Karen George at Coonara about her experience. "Every day, we are learning new things, adding widgets and gadgets to make the learner experience much more engaging. We also don’t forget about our trainers. The sites need to be pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate and easy to find the information we need. We are all time poor so design and ease of use is a must. Tutors who once resisted are now using the sites to get their work done…It’s now an expectation that all staff access appropriate wiki sites to keep themselves informed." Kristine Roshau and Concordia University do a great job combining a clear welcome message with a snazzy logo. Take a look below. Create an Editable Website We recently unveiled a new option for your wiki: our editable website mode. This mode lets you hide the management tools of the wiki so your users see a simple clean interface. A lot of our users have told us they love this new mode, including Karen from Coorana. She chooses this mode when creating wikis for groups who need to view and access resources on a site but won’t be editing. Use Buttons for Navigation Maria Sardo and her colleagues from Sysco have created an easy-to-use homepage for their wiki on their Private Label site. Diane, a member of their team, created a beautiful streamlined design that uses graphics for navigation buttons. Her team uses them to easily move around the site. Sharmaine Sharusan, a Private Label customer from Everest College, created a smartphone-like experience for her users and shared her design secrets with us. "I used a simulated button design to mimic the familiarity of apps that most users are accustomed to seeing on their smartphones. Most of those links open in a new window/tab while still allowing them to have access to the original homepage. "Additionally, I chose the size of the buttons in order to fit on screens with lower resolutions. And I chose icons and words for the visual recognition of the service/website they would be accessing. The other clever thing I did was make each row a separate page. The same buttons can be seen on other sites within our Private Label. In the long-run, this makes it easier to swap out icons on the homepage just by making a change on the included page." Create a Site Directory on Your Homepage In large schools and districts, the amount of resources and information can be daunting. By adding a little structure, Mike Baker of South Side Area School District in Pennsylvania, made it easy for people to access and add to the information they want. "We use our Private Label as our students’ homepage in the computer lab. This allows even Kindergarten students to click the home button and go directly to a common starting point. We have our students using the ‘Rover’ app on their iPads and going to the bookmarked student wiki. All of the district’s online learners access various courses via our wiki. This concept is quick to edit and keeps students organized." Above are a few simple ideas for creating a stunning, easy-to-navigate, and effective home page. We hope you’re inspired by your fellow users’ designs. We’re always looking to see more. Feel free to share your work of art with us at help@wikispaces.com or on Twitter.

If you’re a data lover, you’re going to love our latest feature: downloadable tables. You can now take the data on your wiki or Private Label site - who your users are, your discussion topics, the tags on your wiki based on frequency, even who is monitoring content on your site - and download these lists as convenient .csv files. Use these files to easily track and manage activity, create graphs to illustrate the activity and effectiveness of your site over time, and much more. Your data is now yours to explore and manipulate. Our more popular downloadable lists include: All users on your site or wiki All wikis on your site All public wikis on your site Revisions to a wiki page Page discussion topics To download your data, head to any data table on your site, scroll to the bottom of the table and click Download. It’s that easy. We’d love to hear which data sets you love the most and what you’ve found by exploring your data. Let us know in the comments below or via Twitter.

As of April 5, 2013, we will no longer support Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) on Wikispaces. Starting March 12, visitors to any Wikispaces site using IE 7 will see a warning banner linking to this blog post. We will continue to support Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10 as well as modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you are using IE 7 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 Chrome or Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 was released almost seven years ago in October 2006. Microsoft has since release three new major IE versions, with IE 10 launching at the end of 2012. Given the tiny percentage of visitors who still use IE 7 on Wikispaces, we can’t continue to justify the amount of work that is required to maintain support. We’re in good company; Google and Facebook both stopped supporting IE 7 in 2011. And, critically, your choice of safe, fast, and free alternatives has never been better. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@wikispaces.com.

Joe Mazza started the Knapp’s Family Engagement Wiki in March of 2010. We spoke with Gwen Pescatore, Knapp Elementary’s Home & School President. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do. We are an elementary school in Lansdale, PA. Our wiki page is our one-stop location where families can find all info for both our school and our Home & School Association. We not only use it to share our information, but also to encourage two-way communication and family involvement. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Not being the one who edits the page, but as a parent and contributor of information….my favorite feature is the ability for us to add widgets (such as a translator). We have over 20 languages spoken at our school and without this option, we limit our ability to share information with so many of our families. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We use the wiki to share the basics, such as our school calendar, policies and parent association’s monthly meeting minutes, but also to engage families in the two-way communication that we want so much. We do this by embedding a Twitter feed on the front page which shows tweets from throughout the school day, and adding forms, such as the eBucket Filler, for families to fill out when a student has done something worthy of recognition (even when not in school). 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" There is no one "Aha" moment, but knowing that we conveniently have one place where families can find everything - links to our social media feeds, videos and pictures shared from the school day and events, postings of school policies and event flyers, an easy to complete form to commend a student’s good deed or act - all right from the wiki, is priceless. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Knapp values the importance of families having the knowledge about what their students are doing and can be doing at school, believes in providing the resources for all students to be their best, and encourages all families to be actively involved in their student’s education.

In this Tips and Tricks, we’ll take a look at Google Forms and how educators are embedding them in their wikis to create more interactive online classrooms. Create a survey Want to make your classroom a two-way conversation? Add a survey to your wiki and get feedback from your students on a particular unit. Or create a wiki page highlighting your recent class field trip and invite parents to fill out a survey on their chaperoning experience. Build an online quiz Looking to spruce up your quizzes? Embed a weekly vocabulary quiz on your wiki that your students can answer online. Or create practice quizzes for your students to do at home in preparation for the big exam. By embedding the quizzes on your classroom wiki, your students will always know where to head to find the latest test. Engage the community Looking to connect your classroom with the community? Have your students create online polls around a particular unit, embed them on the wiki, and invite members of your local or Twitter community to fill them out. Your kids will love seeing the wiki stats change as people outside the classroom engage with what they’re learning. In return, your community will get a peek into your classroom and all the great things you’re doing on your wiki. Handle simple administrative tasks Want an easier way to handle those little administrative tasks? Create a checklist for your daily attendance to easily mark students as present or absent. Or create a form for classroom observations or student assessments. You’ll be able to access your data online in a Google Spreadsheet. To add a Google Form to your wiki: Head to your Google account, and then to Google Drive. Click Create and choose the Form option. Create your quiz. You can choose between multiple choose questions, check boxes, text responses and more. Once you’ve finished adding your questions, click the Send Form button at the top right. Choose Embed and copy the HTML code that appears. Return to your wiki and edit the page where you’d like to put the quiz. Go to the Widget tool in the toolbar and down to Other HTML. Paste the embed code there and click Save. Save your page to see the form. The responses to this form will appear in a Google Spreadsheet. These are just a few ideas of how you can use Google Forms on your wiki. We’d love to hear other ways you’re using them. Feel free to comment below or let us know on Twitter.

A wiki is a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use platform for sharing knowledge across your organization. It’s also one that you and your employees will love using. Here are some of the reasons Wikispaces makes knowledge sharing a breeze: It’s as simple as Edit, Type, Save Wikispaces is designed so that anyone can use it, regardless of their technical know-how. Our single-click Edit button and Visual Editor make adding content as easy as editing a Word Document. Give it a try in our Sandbox wiki. Add relevant resources, regardless of their file type or location Our Link, File, and Widget tools let you pull together all your valuable resources. Found a great article on market changes in your industry, go ahead and link to it. Created a training video for new employees, embed it on the New Employee’s page. Have a great sales proposal template, share it on your department’s page. Regardless of what format your knowledge takes - video, slideshow, document, text, audio, Twitter feed - you can add it to your wiki. Track the conversation With History, and Recent Changes, you can easily keep track of who is speaking and what content they’re adding. If you have a question about any contribution, you can always reach out to the author. And with email Notifications, you can see who’s making changes at any moment, and jump into the conversation as it’s happening. A platform that bends with you, not the other way around Most importantly, Wikispaces lets you organize your information in the way that works best for you. You can begin by creating a series of subpages for each department, regional office, or projects. As small work groups sprout up to plan a conference or prepare for a large release, they can create pages and structures that work for them. And if individuals just want keep tabs on their own pages, they can do so with our Tags feature. Wikis aren’t rigid structures you have to follow; they change and grow based on your organization’s needs. Take a look at our recent webinar on Building Knowledge Bases to learn more about creating and using a wiki knowledge base in your organization: Set up a knowledge base for your business or organization If you’re looking for a knowledge base for your organization, you might consider our Private Label service. With additional features like unlimited wikis, your own branded environment, and integration with your existing systems, Wikispaces Private Label is a powerful collaborative platform for your organization.

We’re running a survey to learn what you think about Wikispaces so we can make it even better for you. The survey is completely confidential and only takes a couple of minutes to fill out. We’d love to hear from you. Click here to fill out the survey. We’d really appreciate it. Thank you.

Are you attending the Sloan Consortium / MERLOT Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in Las Vegas this week? Us too. Wikispaces Co-Founder James Byers will be at the conference from Tuesday - Thursday and would love to meet up and talk about how wikis fit into your world. James will also be kicking off Thursday’s events with a breakfast presentation, "Ed-Tech Startups: Lost in the Desert?" He’ll be digging into the unique challenges faced by education startups and look at how founders, investors, and most importantly students and teachers can play a part in building sustainable companies. Whether or not you’re attending SLOAN-C, our paper "How to Succeed in Ed-Technology" gives you the background about how we at Wikispaces think about the education startup world. If you’d like to meet up please drop us a note at help@wikispaces.com.

James and I will be attending the ASU/GSV Education Innovation Summit in Phoenix next week. We’re looking forward to meeting and being inspired by a lot of great entrepreneurs and teachers. We wrote a short piece for their blog to stimulate discussion about how people in ed-tech define and pursue success. Let us know if you’re going to be at the event in Phoenix so we can meet up and of course please share your thoughts on what a successful ed-tech company looks like to you.

Today we are extraordinarily pleased to announce Wikispaces Classroom to the world. Wikispaces Classroom is a brand new product from the Wikispaces team entirely and exclusively for teachers and students. Over the years we’ve distilled what we believe and do into one simple thing: help teachers help students. And Wikispaces Classroom is our attempt to take that to the next level. When we ask ourselves, our users, and our customers, what we can do to better help teachers help their students, the message always comes down to three things: Keep it simple. Help teachers and students engage deeply. Help teachers improve student outcomes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. Simplicity. Wikispaces was built to help people work together. All kinds of people, in all kinds of contexts. Over the years we made it easier and easier for teachers and students to use Wikispaces but there were always parts of Wikispaces that weren’t designed for the classroom and frankly, got in the way. In Wikispaces Classroom, all that is gone. It’s streamlined and focused, it puts everything you need to manage your classroom right up front, and it gets everything you don’t need right out of the way. Engagement. Wikispaces has always been about engaging teachers and students in meaningful activity and communication in and around the learning process. For Wikispaces Classroom we’ve designed an entirely new way to manage and talk about everything that goes on in our class. Featuring a modern newsfeed, and a simple way to manage assignments, announcements, events, and all of your resources and work, it’s everything you and your students love about social networking but private, in your classroom, and integrated with your day to day work. Improve Outcomes. We know that the key to improving student outcomes, however you define them, is to help teachers understand what is happening with each student every day, so that they can spend their time helping each student the way that student needs to be helped. Wikispaces has always had an enormous amount of data about what students are doing, and how they are doing, under the hood, and so we just decided to give that data to teachers in a way they can actually use. In formal terms, it’s formative assessment. In our terms, its our way of making the lives of teachers easier, and helping them help more kids, more efficiently, and more effectively. And of course, Wikispaces Classroom is free for teachers and students. You can create a new Wikispaces Classroom now, or convert an existing wiki to Wikispaces Classroom in your Settings area. We’ll be posting more detail every day this week, so stay tuned, and let us know what you think. We’ll be hosting weekly webinar tours; sign up here.