Teachers are busy. Students are busy. Managing 30-to-150 of them and their work in the classroom can take a lot of extra time that could be spent planning engaging lessons. Our new free product, Wikispaces Classroom, helps teachers be more productive by saving time managing and organizing student information. We’d like to introduce you to The News Feed. News Feed We know that comments, messages, and discussions can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of all of your great wiki pages. The News Feed is your Classroom Homepage and has some helpful features to keep you and your students on track in a simple and engaging way. This is a stream of information from you and all students on your Wiki, including Discussions, Projects, and Events. Students can reply on each thread, making for easy and instant communication. You can even enable Email Notifications to stay on top of things as soon as possible. Projects Projects are a great feature that have been a part of Wikispaces for a while, and with the Wikispaces Classroom News Feed, we think it will be even simpler for you to create and manage them. Directly from the News Feed, you can choose "Project," enter a description, and a start date and an end date, and then you are immediately taken to create a Project. The Projects homepage puts all of your projects in one place to organize. Looking for ideas? Think of anything in your class that you would assign your students, either individually or collaboratively- a Literature Circle Book Group, a research page for a writing project — and you can create it from the News Feed and track its progress from the Projects menu. Best of all, from the News Feed, you can choose who to direct a Discussion to by Project, making it easy for you to send information to each group. This is a great way to have one Wiki for your course, but different Teams for each of your classes and/or projects and communicate with them separately. Events and Calendar Check out the Calendar Feature, top and center, highlighting upcoming Assignments and Events that you plan for students. In addition to Discussions and Projects, you now can easily create Events on the News Feed. Events then appear on the Calendar tool, which includes a list of the next few upcoming Events and Projects as well as a traditional calender view. The Calendar is particular to each student, so they’ll only see items that are applicable to them. The Calendar makes it easy to keep track of assignments. And of course, your regular wiki Pages are still there, on the top right, for you to make classroom subject-based wikis and resources just like before. Want to get started? Simply choose "Wikispaces Classroom" when you create a new wiki, or go to "Settings" and change your Wiki Type to Classroom to convert your current wiki. Stay tuned this week as we highlight more Wikispaces Classroom news and features, and register for a live webinar tour here.

One of the most powerful things you can do as a teacher is personalize your students’ learning. We know it’s no easy feat, however, with class sizes making it difficult to differentiate and keep track of each student’s progress. In an effort to help you with this challenge we’ve built Wikispaces Classroom’s Formative Assessment feature. As an organizer of your Classroom, you have an orange bar along the top of your wiki that students don’t. It easily allows you to access Members, Projects, Settings and Assessment. Formative Assessment The first thing you’ll see when you click Assessment, is your Engagement page. Each of your students appears on the Engagement page, and you get an accurate and real-time reading of their activity on the wiki. You’ll be able to monitor their level of contribution, see whether they are reading or writing, and give them support when and where it’s needed. The graphs are constantly refreshing, so you can stay on track even in the middle of your lesson. Try it on your iPad. When you start your writing lesson, and dispatch your students to work on their research with each other, you can walk around the class and see their activity. Differentiation has never been easier. An easy key helps you read the engagement graph. The circles next to each name help you quickly identify students who are extremely active, online doing moderate work, or not online at all. The graphs for each student highlight if they are online viewing a wiki (the thick green line), typing characters into a wiki (the thick black bars), or have recently saved a new page version (red dots). At a quick glance, you can see who in your class might be having a slow start and immediately provide the support or encouragement they need. Follow your students’ engagement by student or project. While seeing which students are active is good, being able to see specific work done by a student is even better. By clicking on the one of the red dots, you’ll pull up the actual page edit the student did, allowing you to see any deletions and insertions and gauge their understanding of the assignment. Directly from here, you can insert comments and discussion posts to encourage the student and provide feedback. Click on the graph to view real-time page edits from students. You can monitor engagement by user or by Project. By switching to Project View, you can glance at activity by each individual team, helping you spot check a struggling group and provide assistance. Use the Filter dropdown to choose a specific project quickly. View engagement by projects. In the near future we’ll add the ability to choose the time increment right up on top so you can decide at what level you’d like to assess your students. The more recent the assessment, the more formative your use of it can be. Looking back over time allows you and your students to prepare for summative assessments and parent/teacher and student-led conferences. Best of all, our Formative Assessment feature works great on mobile devices, allowing you to track this information while on the go in your room, not shackled to your desk. We know 21st century educators are an active bunch, moving about their classrooms as students collaborate with each other. Now you can keep tabs on up-to-the-minute activity by keeping your tablet or phone on the Engagement page and noting if anyone needs your help. Sign up for one of our live tours, happening once a week, to learn more.  

A big part of our focus for Wikispaces Classroom was making things easier. We removed features people weren’t using or got in the way. We made the layout cleaner, simpler, and harder to break. And we also exposed the powerful functionality we have under the hood in ways that make it really easy to do the things you want to do. There are many different ways for a teacher to organize their digital classroom these days, from the bare minimum to intricate learning management systems. With Wikispaces Classroom, we wanted to give you what you love about Wikispaces — its simplicity and ease of use — along with an extra layer of management for the classroom that we hope you’ll find equally simple, for you and students alike. This first thing you’ll notice is the overall theme change — there is a standard background, settings bar, and navigation bar to make it easy for your students to focus on their work and for you to focus on them. Organizer Bar The Organizer Bar lets you access Members, Settings, Projects, and Assessments. We’ve taken the settings you most care about as a teacher and put them at the top of each Wikispaces Classroom page so you can access these controls whenever you need them. These used to exist in the right-hand navigation bar, now you can access the most important aspects of managing your wiki - Members, Projects, Assessment, and Settings in a way that is separate from your pages. And when students log in, they don’t see this bar, meaning they can just focus on the Pages and Projects they are working on. Navigation Bar The Navigation Bar has always been the hub for access to all of your Wiki pages. In Wikispaces Classroom, we’ve pared it down to be just what you need. A link to your News Feed will always be on top as the central location for up-to-the-minute information on your wiki. Below that, you’ll see a collection of your Pages, which you can now organize even more. Just click and drag up and down to reorder, or click "Edit Navigation" to turn off "All Pages" and use Tags instead. However you use it, you’ll notice it’s designed to help you focus on just your important Pages. The Navigation Bar now only features News Feed, Pages, and Tags. Settings We’ve taken all the functionality of the old Manage Wiki area and renamed it Settings with a whole new look and feel that’s cleaner and more intuitive. Not only do you access it on the top Organizer Bar, but now you can quickly move between each section of the Settings area from one page. We think you’ll find it much simpler to use. Settings is now more streamlined and easier to use. We can’t wait to see how you and your students use Wikispaces Classroom, and we think these changes add up to a whole new experience that allows you to focus on engaging your students and improving their outcomes. Learn more about Wikispaces Classroom at one of our upcoming webinar tours, and join our Twitter #wclassroom Challenge online this month, sharing your Wikispaces Classroom with the world. Simply Tweet a link to your site with #wclassroom today.

Moritz Lehmann started the CBCL Showcase wiki in Jan of 2013. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: CBCL Limited provides excellence in engineering and related services in Atlantic Canada, headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We use wikis to set up project-specific websites serving primarily as knowledge bases, communication platforms and progress-tracking tools. This wiki is used to manage a large environmental monitoring project. We take thousands of samples per year all across the province. The wiki allows us to keep track of our progress and provides essential information to staff in the field. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? We love the ability to easily integrate content from services such as Google Earth and Picasa. This provides functionality and a rich experience to our users. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Technologists returning from field work upload their GPS tracks, photographs and other information to the wiki to report their progress to project managers and clients almost in real-time. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I was in the field one day getting ready to launch a boat to take samples. At that time, strong winds were picking up from the southwest and I had to abandon my planned sampling run. I was able to consult the wiki to find a nearby and sheltered sampling area. The wiki told me that this area had not been sampled previously and allowed me to download the location of sampling stations to my iPad. That way, it saved my schedule and money. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "Your pages may not be the most beautiful or fancy, but they sure get a lot of use!"

We’re very excited to be reading your tweets, blog comments, and emails about how you’re getting started with Wikispaces Classroom. We wanted to share with you a few basic steps to get your online classroom up and running without too much work. Note: if you are a Private Label customer, Wikispaces Classroom features will be rolling out in the coming weeks so we can get things just right for you! Starting with your Existing Site We know many of our users have amazing Wikispaces.com and Wikispaces Private Label sites already set up and running effectively. The first step to trying out Wikispaces Classroom is going into your Settings and switching it to Classroom mode. Remember once you switch, Settings will be up top on your Organizer Bar. Basic Wikispaces Page Now you’ll notice a few things change. First your theme will be standardized. For the moment, all Wikispaces Classrooms have this simple theme so that we can guarantee a really good user experience and you and your students can focus on your work. To change to Classroom, simply go to Settings. None of your data will be lost in the change and you can always change back. We hope you’ll love the new environment, though, and look forward to any feedback you have that will help us make the transition even easier. Preparing Your Students While many of your students may be tech-savvy, they’ll still need to learn the norms of your online classroom to maximize their learning time on the site. The first thing you’ll need to do, of course, is get them there! If you don’t already have accounts for students, you can easily create them under Settings-User Creator. Make your student accounts with User Creator. Since Wikispaces Classroom is a social environment, we encourage teachers to have students create avatars that represent themselves the first day. There are many fun avatar creators out there, like the Simpsons Ride creator we used, and you can find one suitable for your class with a quick online search for "avatar creator." To get started, simply have your students click on their username in the top right of the page and then click on Settings. After that, they can click "Change picture" to upload their picture. Teachers, don’t forget to make one for yourself! It all adds to the creation of motivation and community in your Wikispaces Classroom. Easily add a picture to your profile. Setting Up Your Newsfeed Last week, we highlighted how the Newsfeed works- it’s the new homepage for your Wikispaces Classroom. Now that your students are created and have avatars, you’re ready to give them something to do! Starting a Discussion is easy- think of a question you’d like the whole class to respond to. It could be homework and something they respond to before coming into class, or perhaps it’s a mid-class break where you’d like to collect all of their feedback. Whatever the question, post it and watch your students easily respond! All Discussions on the News Feed continue to aggregate here, so you can start new ones, go back to old, and Monitor or Lock your posts. Best of all, students can pose their own questions for the class, and then see their classmates’ thoughts on their questions. Setting up norms with your Newsfeed. The next step is to plan for your Discussions- when will you post, when will students be expected to post, and what are acceptable comments? We have seen Wikispaces teachers create wonderful lessons for preparing students to collaboratively write and can’t wait to hear how you prepare them for the News Feed. A good rule of thumb is to allow for practice and modeling of great comments and potentially allowing for online participation to figure into your assessments. We hope these are helpful for your first steps into Wikispaces Classroom- the easiest part is just switching it on in Settings. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be highlighting other ways to get started- stay tuned for Projects! Please watch more on our archived Wikispaces Classroom Demo and Tour or sign up for an upcoming live tour. Once you make your Classroom, we’d love it if you’d join our #wclassroom Challenge on Twitter! Simply tweet out your Classroom and how you’re using it with #wclassroom. Don’t have Twitter? Comment below.

We love projects in education and think they’re powerful ways for students to show their understanding of a topic and to explore areas of their own interest. We created our Projects feature last year to help facilitate and manage projects in the classroom. In Wikispaces Classroom, Projects are integrated right from the beginning of your experience. *Note- all you need to get started is to go to Settings and select Classroom as your Wiki Type. Private Label folks, coming very soon! Organization Bar Wikispaces Projects are spaces for your students to work in that you can share with only those people you want to be involved. Students can work together in their own space, you can monitor and manage each project, and now, with Classroom, you can use our new Assessment feature to see how students in each Project are doing. Let’s walk you through how to get a Project up and running. To get started, once you’re in your Wikispaces Classroom, you can either create a Project directly on the Calendar, or go to the Projects link on the top Organizational Bar and start from there. The advantage of starting your Project on your Calendar is 1) the Project will show up for you and your students on the News Feed and 2) you can assign start dates and end dates as you create your Project. You’ll know you’re creating a Project because of the small Project icon on the top right of your post. Just like any other News Feed item, you can also send an email about it to all your students and disable comments if you like. Allowing comments however means that students can discuss and ask questions about the Project right from the News Feed. Starting a Project Once you click Create, you’ll be taken to the Project page. You’ll see your class list on the right, and you’ll be prompted to create Teams. Each team will have their own area to work in, with their own permissions. Once you create Teams, you can either drag and drop students to assign them to Teams or upload a .csv file that has student usernames in one column and the Team you want each student in in the other. You can also Assign Randomly and try your luck with groupings. If there are some pairings that simply won’t work, you can just drag them into a different box. Problem solved! Creating Teams Assigning Members Once your Teams are set, you can also set their Permissions. Do this one by one (by clicking on the lock that says "Private," which is the default setting,) or click "Set All Permissions" at the bottom to set them in one fell swoop. You can also click on the Calendar to track events and due dates for each individual project. Permissions If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute. Project Home Page When you click on each individual team, you’ll be taken to that team’s Home Page. You’ll see the pages in that team’s Project listed, and you can track recent changes and any other Pages or Files the Team members have added. Pages If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click "Projects." The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive. Project List If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute. If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click "Projects." The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive. Assessment Every good project needs a way for the teacher to quickly monitor what’s going on, and our Assessment tool is a great way to do just that. If you click "Projects" inside your Assessments tool, each of your Projects will display showing recent activity, both reading and writing. For now, you can only filter by the last 30 minutes, but soon you’ll be able to view activity over time, making for incredible opportunities for formative assessment. Imagine being able to tell the "Cs through Unn" team what an awesome job they’re doing, and giving the "He through Ne" team a nudge and the support they need to succeed- all within the same class period. The sky really is the limit when you set up Projects in your classroom. They can be small assignments, large, several month-long projects, or year-long projects, like a space for weekly writing, an ePortfolio, or individual projects. We can’t wait to hear how you use them. Stay tuned this week as we cover more about the Assessment tool, and do join us for our online Wikispaces Classroom Office Hours and Tour next Tuesday at 4PM Sydney, Australia time! Also feel free to share your classroom here or on Twitter with the #wclassroom hashtag to enter our contest.

We hope you’ve had a good time experimenting with Wikispaces Classroom and its new features- we’ve certainly enjoyed hearing your feedback and seeing your examples on Twitter, the blog, and via email. One thing we know you’re trying out is the Navigation, a wiki’s hub to get where you need to go. At its core, the Classroom Navigation is still very similar to a Classic Wiki page’s navigation. As a default, "All Pages" makes an alphabetical list of all of your pages on the right-hand side of your wiki. We know that you often want different navigation, however. By clicking "edit navigation" at the bottom, you’ll get the following options: The first thing you can do is reorder your pages. Simply drag and drop the page where you’d like it to show up. You’ll also see an "x" appear next to "All Pages." If you click that, it removes "All Pages" from your navigation bar. But don’t worry, you can get it back anytime by clicking the new "Add All Pages" button that appears. If you decide to keep "All Pages" deleted, then you’ll need to set up navigation another way: Tags. Tagging allows you to label each page with one or several Tags, and then when you add that Tag to your Navigation, users can find all pages associated with that Tag. The first thing you’ll need to do is tag your Pages. Looking at all of your pages, you’ll need to decide what your categories, or tags, will be. For example, you might want all of these pages- Mathematics, Reader’s Workshop, Science, and Social Studies- to show up under the tag "Resources." First, type in the word Resources where it says "Tag" and press "Add." It will create a category in the Navigation bar but it will be empty because there are no pages with that tag yet. To tag some pages, go to "Pages and Files" above the Navigation. It will bring up a list of all of the Pages and Files in with your Classroom. First, click the small box on the left of any page you want to tag with "Resources." Then go to the top of the page where it says "Edit Tags" and type in "Resources". Then press "Add tags." Now go check out your masterpiece under "Pages and Files." You’ll see your Tag name as a large header with a drop-down box of all of the pages you just tagged. Now you can repeat the process with other categories you’d like to show up in your Navigation. You may notice there is currently not a way to customize the navigation any further as you can in a Classic Wiki. In keeping with the theme of simplicity for Wikispaces Classroom, we wanted to keep Navigation as clean and simple as possible for students. To see more Navigation editing in action, watch one of our recent Wikispaces Classroom webinars here, or sign up for an upcoming event. Let us know how you decide to organize your wiki below!

You may have noticed a few subtle changes around the time we introduced Wikispaces Classroom. On Twitter, we saw that one of our favorite Wikispaces users, Gwyneth Jones, known widely as The Daring Librarian, did: It’s true! We love our plant logo as much as Gwyneth does as it’s been with us from the start, but with Wikispaces Classroom we felt it was time for a change. We originally thought about wikis as little communities carefully trimmed and shaped by their caretakers — hence the bonsai tree. We still do, but since education is our focus, we wanted a new logo that reflected that. By replacing the bonsai plant you all know and love, we hope we’re signaling to you how our design changes will reflect our focus teaching and learning. Think of everything you do on a wiki- editing a wiki truly is social writing, and we’ve been developing the best tool we can for writing socially in the past 7 years. Our new logo celebrates all of the writing that you can do with a wiki- writing your syllabus, writing an in-line comment giving timely feedback, writing a discussion prompt, adding to your colleagues’ writing by putting a few more words in or sharing a link- and puts it front and center. The four pencils in our new logo point to the center, symbolizing this convergence. Social writing in 2013 means your students have a global audience, and they’re more motivated than ever to write content that inspires. It means your students can be writing on a wiki with a buddy from Africa and compare and contrast their ideas and words with someone half a world away. Our new Classroom features the Newsfeed at its heart, which puts student and teacher writing and ideas at the front of every classroom wiki, where responses can flow easily and in one place. Comments are even easier, and discussions can happen on each page for every piece of content you have. We really like the change, and hope you do too. Let us know how social writing has changed your world below.

My wiki adventures began in early 2010. I originally planned to use my class wiki as an online message board to keep parents informed about what was happening in my class of 10-11 year olds and to post information, such as homework assignments and important dates. The wiki format was quick and easy to use and the "What you see is what you get" editor suited the needs of a busy teacher. The collaborative nature of Wikispaces meant that the children were soon getting in on the action and making their own pages. There were pages dedicated to sport teams, pets, gymnastics, art tutorials and even cookery tips. The children began uploading images and text without me even showing them how to edit the page. We started to use Wikispaces more frequently in class and eventually we ditched our class page on the school learning platform and started using our Wikispaces page as our online hub. The children began to make even more impressive pages with embedded content and media from around the web. One memorable project involved the class making their own TV production company, for which they wrote, designed, filmed and produced everything for their own TV show, including advertisements. We used a range of websites to help us, but every stage of the process was managed, collated and published on our class wiki. I began to upload most of my lesson resources to the wiki so that the children could access some of the material before they came into class and so they could get on with applying what they had learned as soon as they got there. I only found out much later that many educators were "flipping" their classrooms in this way. The response from the children and their parents was superb and we found that the wiki was getting hits from across the world. My class also worked on a collaborative project with our partner school in China using a separate wiki, http://speechbubbles.wikispaces.com. Both schools began making videos to teach each other our native languages. The children choose the words and phrases they thought would be useful to new learners. They made the videos in small groups between classes and edited them during the school’s tech club. This project caught the attention of the local government and I was asked to talk about using wikis in education at a number of conferences and meetings. More and more teachers from other schools contacted me about the resources I was sharing and about how they could create their own wikis in their schools. In December 2010, I setup a wiki that was designed to share the interesting things I found online with teachers in my school and with educators around the world. Three years and many awards later, the ICTmagic wiki at http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com receives thousands of hits each day and it is full of resources for every kind of teacher. Now with the new "Classroom" setting, our wiki page has become even more useful and interactive. The front page allows you to add messages and create a feed for parents and the children. There is also a project feature which allows you to manage classroom assignments and homework by creating teams and pages for a special project. The assessment tool allows me to see which parts of a wiki page were edited by whom and how long they worked on it, making it easy to ensure that everyone is pulling their weight and to help or congratulate individual children on their posts. It is not hyperbole to say that using wikis has changed the way I teach, learn and collaborate with my class and with other educators. Start on your own wiki adventure and see where it takes you. Martin Burrett (@ICTmagic) is a Year 5/6 teacher at Mersea Island School in Essex UK. He is an educational speaker and an advocate for using digital technology to improve teaching and learning in schools.

We’re excited to announce two new education widgets available today for embedding on your wikis: DOGOnews and DOGObooks. We’re also proud to support the DOGObooks Summer Reading program. Keep reading to learn more! Embed DOGO Content on Your Pages DOGOnews is a great source for current events, news and non-fiction articles for kids and teachers. DOGOnews articles are written specifically for children and are a favorite source for language arts, science and social studies lesson plans in the classroom and current events homework help at home. DOGObooks is where kids discover, review and rate the books they love. All book selections and reviews are moderated prior to being published. Now you can embed news and book summaries from both sites on Wikispaces! In the Wikispaces Editor, click Widget, choose the new Education category, and select DOGOnews or DOGObooks. Search for the content you’re looking for, click Select, and click Insert. DOGObooks Free Summer Reading Program The DOGObooks Summer Reading program is designed to help students keep up their reading skills and continue developing their critical thinking and writing skills by writing reviews and sharing their opinion with peers. Nothing motivates students more than rewards, which is why DOGObooks is giving away one free book for every three books students read and review. And the top ten participating schools will win two hundred books! For Students Visit the Summer Reading Program page and fill out the consent form Select and read three books from the reading list and review them on DOGObooks Win a free book The reading list is comprised of over 80 elementary and middle school titles carefully selected by leading children’s book publishers, to ensure there is something to suit every reader. Students who complete three reviews can choose their free prize from a catalog of over 4,000 great books, and can continue to collect awards until all the free books are gone. Win Books For Your School Library DOGObooks also lets kids give credit to their schools for their reviews. The top ten schools that score the most reviews will win 200 (gently used) books for their library from Better World Books.