Amie Weldy is an Instructional Technology Specialist from Forsyth County, Georgia whom we’ve enjoyed learning from on Twitter! We’re pleased to feature her and her creative classroom practice as a guest blogger this week. Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas with Amie here: Twitter: @AmieWeldy Website: myhotspot-amie.blogspot.com   Last year, I decided I wanted to try "flipping the classroom" with my 7th and 8th graders. I had heard about it, but I was a little intimidated by the idea. Flipping the classroom by definition is having students learn the content at home and when they come to class they complete a performance task or project based assignment where they apply what they learned at home. In my opinion, the teacher facilitates learning and helps students during the application process by moving around the classroom and giving feedback on the product as it is being created. It was scary letting go of the reins of being in front of the class and letting the students be in charge of their learning. It is an untraditional approach, but their engagement and they products they created were absolutely worth it! I had used Wikispaces previously as a website for information in my college cohort, so I thought it would be a great idea to use it in the classroom as a collaborative space for students and myself. The first wiki I did with my students was our Roller Coaster Project for 8th graders who were taking an advanced 9th grade physical science class and were learning about forces and motion. Students worked in groups of 3-4 to construct and label a roller coaster. We used Wikispaces as a collaborative area for the teacher to extend the classroom to home. The wiki housed all of our flipped classroom assignments and resources. With this first wiki, students learned how to access information on the Wikispaces page. After I showed them the first time and told them that I expected from them, I was hands-off. They would come in every day and have a short quiz on an instant response website and then would get started on building their roller coaster. They knew that when they walked in the door, they were to take the quiz and start building. A big reason I used Wikispaces was to engage students in their own learning. Every project they did where we used Wikispaces, the students were involved in the process of learning and were taking ownership of it. As the year went on, our classroom Wikispaces usage evolved into students creating and collaborating even more on the site. After the initial roller coaster project, I had students edit their own pages and collaborate with their group members through pages on the site. Instead of going to a website to read and take notes, they went to the site and added their part. They were responsible for a part in a greater whole; the engagement with them knowing this was astounding! The first time I used Wikispaces with students, I had to create accounts for around 90 6th graders. It took a lot of time on my part to make all of those accounts, get the information to the students, make account permission strict, and so forth. It was definitely doable, it just took a bit more time to get it started. The next year, our county purchased a Wikispaces Campus license and moved our wikis over to our own site. This was so much easier because our students already have a username and password they use for everything else and with the Campus site we were able to link their school usernames and passwords to Wikispaces. This cut down significantly on the initial prep I had to do. I could instead focus on making the site more collaborative and good looking! I have thoroughly enjoyed using Wikispaces in the classroom. It is one of the most powerful collaborative tools I have ever found. I am presenting at the upcoming Georgia Educational Technology Conference; my session, "Flip it! Using Wikispaces to Engage Learns and Extend the Classroom," will be on Thursday, November 7th from 3:15- 4:15. Please stop by if you are there! Amie will be joining us as a special guest panelist at an upcoming Flip Your Classroom with Wikispaces Hangout on Air in November. Stay tuned to learn more!  Want to see more of Amie’s examples of flipped teaching with Wikispaces? Check out two more of her projects here: Ecology project: 7th grade students used Wikispaces to find nightly assignments for their ticket-in-the-door the next day. They created a mockumentary or a website describing a specific biome and uploaded it or linked it on the wiki. They then taught the class about that biome while the audience gave positive feedback to them through a backchannel conversation using Socrative.  Biodiversity project: 7th grade students had to work together to describe issues in our biosphere. They were assigned specific QR codes on a cube. Each person was responsible for their own research, which they put onto their group Wikispaces page. Next, they had to collaborate on creating a presentation to show the class which they embedded and linked into Wikispaces.

Math teachers rejoice: one of your favorite online tools now comes embedded right in your Wikispaces page! We’re very pleased to announce a new Widget available in the Education Gallery: GeoGebra. GeoGebra is a free, multi-platform online tool that allows students to visualize mathematical concepts. Now you can integrate GeoGebraTube materials directly into your wiki! GeoGebraTube is a repository of dynamic mathematics teaching and learning materials created and shared by GeoGebra users. Teachers and students search this database to view, download, revise, create and share worksheets with others. To embed one of these resources in your wiki, go to "Edit" and "Widget" on any of your wiki pages and choose "Education" the "Geogebra" to find pages and pages of interactive student "worksheets" that embed beautifully on your wiki. Amazingly, GeoGebraTube averages 100 new pieces of material every day and has had 22 million visitors since its launch 18 months ago, with some applets receiving more than 100,000 views, exemplified by a Hong Kong based user with 129,000+ views for a worksheet on area of circles. Want to give it a try? Open up your Math project page or assignment page and add a GeoGebra widget, like "Dissecting a Quadrilateral," press "Save," and start clicking away. If you press the Gear to the right of the widget before inserting, you can control its size, labeling and other customizations. You can even preview before embedding. The GeoGebra Education widget joins a growing list of interactive widgets you can embed into you wiki. Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter which is your favorite, and stay tuned for more!

We’re excited to announce Quizlet as the newest addition to our Education Widget gallery. Quizlet is the #3 app in the Education section of the app store, and there’s definitely a reason why. It’s simple, sleek, and lets you turn what you’re learning in the classroom into fun study materials, quizzes, and games. You can also browse a large selection of material already developed by fellow educators and students and incorporate that into your learning. To embed any or all of your Quizlet learning sets into your wiki, edit your wiki page and go to the "Widget" tool. In the "Education" category, go to "Quizlet." From there you can either log into your Quizlet account to pull up your material or search across peer-generated content in your subject or interest area. Once you’ve chosen your set, you can embed it in one of four study modes: Scatter - Match words to their definitions. Beat your own time or race against your friends. Learn - Answer the questions, track your progress, and review the things you got wrong. Flashcards - The tried and true, this time in digital format. Speller - Type in what you hear. It works in 18 different languages. Save your embed, save the page, and let the fun begin. If you haven’t yet tried Quizlet, do. We think you’ll love it. In fact, if we weren’t busy working on Wikispaces, we might spend all day using Quizlet to quiz each other on our old high school geography.

Part of the fun of engaging with users on the phone, via email, and on social networking sites like Twitter every week is hearing about all of the interesting new ideas happening in the educational technology world. This week, we’ve gathered some inspiring stories and resources from across the web to share with you! 1. #caedchat A regional offshoot of the popular #edchat Twitter chats, last week’s was an inspiring feed. We particularly enjoyed seeing question 7, posed by @hollyclark, about favorite tools for global collaboration: "How do you make connections with other classrooms beyond your school/district in order to collaborate? #caedchat." Folks shared their sources for making connections, including Twitter, Skype in the Classroom, wikis, and more! We’ve loved interacting with #globaled users like Michael Graffin and elementary school teacher in Long Island Lisa Parisi- Lisa has a #globaled wiki project in motion right now, "Using Data to Make Sense of the World." You can join the collaborative project now right in the wiki by adding your classroom information. Read the feed for more excellent ideas like these from #caedchat and participate next week if you’re a Californian educator! Tweets about "#caedchat" 2. CUE Conference The annual fall conference from Computer Using Educators (CUE) happened last weekend in Napa, California; check out the schedule for great ideas and sign up now for the spring conference in Palm Springs, California. Are you presenting at upcoming regional conferences, like last week’s guest blogger Amie Weldy‘s Wikispaces presentation at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference? Let us know on Twitter @wikispaces or in the comments below if so! 3. Online Lesson Sharing Sites Last week, the Huffington Post shared an article about lesson-sharing sites and how the National Education Association (NEA) is joining the fun with an online lesson challenge. It’s interesting to see the bevy of sites become available for teachers to find resources such as Share My Lesson and BetterLesson.  How are your school’s teachers sharing great lessons with one another? We’ve been excited to see many of our teachers use wikis as a homebase to post and share lessons and resources with each other. Last week, our team got to hear from Kathleen Buckley of Brockton Public Schools in Massachusetts- their Bilingual Education Department banded together to create a wiki to quickly and easily learn from each other and create an online home base for the team. 4. Build Up Your Math Toolkit Edutopia had a great post this week sharing 11 virtual math tools for the classroom, replacing some of those large, space-taking manipulatives with digital versions. With Wikispaces, you can integrate any tool that has an embed option and we’re excited to share our new GeoGebra widget this week as well! Read last week’s blog about it and embed it in your wiki today under "Widgets."

Our Projects feature is designed to let teachers easily create member teams in their wiki. However, it’s flexible enough to be used to create Student Workspaces as well. With a personal workspace, your students can: Submit assignments privately Work on their own project, at their own pace Receive personal feedback from their teacher Keep a record of their progress Creating Student Workspaces is easy. You can use a spreadsheet to create a list of members and team names, and then assign members to their personal space: Go to your wiki’s Members page. At the bottom of the Members list, you’ll find a download button that allows you to download your Members spreadsheet: After saving the spreadsheet, open it on your computer. Remove the Members and Type columns, as well as any organizers that show up on the list. Remove the "Name" header on Column A. Copy all usernames to column B, making sure your copied names (i.e. the Project Team names) align with their respective usernames. The result should look like this: Save your spreadsheet as a CSV file and navigate to your wiki’s Projects page by clicking on the Projects icon at the top of any page. Click on Create Project and assign a name to your new project (e.g. "Student Workspace"). Next, click on Add Teams, select "Upload a spreadsheet with usernames and team names", click on "Browse" and choose the username CSV file you’ve created. Make sure all Team permissions are set to Private, to make sure only organizers have access to these personal spaces, as well as the members assigned to their respective spaces. That’s it! You should now have a Student Workspace Project, with each student listed in their respective Team box: Once your Project is ready, students will find a link to their personal space directly on your wiki’s Navigation Bar:

Denise Krebs and Gallit Zvi started the geniushour wiki in March of 2012. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: We are a collaborative group of teachers dedicated to Genius Hour. Genius Hour is a movement in education that allows students to plan their own inquiry projects based on their own passions and wonders. Genius, as Seth Godin describes it, is "the act of solving a problem in a way no one has solved it before. It has nothing to do with winning a Nobel prize in physics or certain levels of schooling. It’s about using human insight and initiative to find original solutions that matter." When students choose their own problems to solve in genius hour, school becomes a wonderful place of learning and growing, a place to be creative and productive and do work that matters. We all know students do not become deeply, personally invested in worksheets, but they do in genius hour. We use our wiki, geniushour.wikispaces.com to share resources, documents and blog links. Another important aspect of our wiki is the chat archive page. On the first Thursday of each month, educators from around the world get on twitter and, using the hashtag #GeniusHour, we have a discussion about how we are implementing Genius Hour in our classrooms, and other related topics. For more information about Genius Hour, read the "Genius Hour Manifesto"! 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The "recent changes" is a wonderful option! Because there is a group of us editing the site regularly, it is nice to see what changes have been recently made (rather than having to scroll through each page and try to discover them)! 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Part of genius hour is having students share their learning with their classroom peers, as well as a global audience. Students use wikis, blogs, Voki, Prezi, Glogster, Powtoon, Voicethread, iMovie, video editing software and YouTube, and many other tools to publish their work. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" We chose to use Wikispaces from the beginning because we wanted this to be a collaborative, interactive site. As a result, there are so many teachers and classrooms doing genius hour around the world now! We want the community to add to and edit this resource. Wikispaces makes it easy for many people to be involved in the wiki. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? We think our wiki would say that we are educators who are passionate about student choice and 21st century learning! And that we are inclusive; let us know if you would like to contribute!

Holiday Movie Marathon Mash-Up Mix up your Netflix queue of holiday classics with recordings from last month’s Global Education Conference, all in one place for your viewing pleasure. And with global wiki projects to join like this one, we’re certain you’ll walk away with a few great ideas for the New Year. Still need more? Take a peek at the #nyscate feed from the annual New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education Conference, and let us know any other great conference feeds to check out this month! Tweets about "#nyscate" Need something live to watch and participate in? Join tonight’s interactive EduTech Smackdown, Dec. 2nd at 8pm Eastern. Buy One Get One Free Google Glass Got your attention! We kid, of course, and while you may itching for a Cyber Monday deal on this piece of tech,  we were  simply excited to read Wikispaces power-user Margaret Powers explain how she’s used the wearable computing device in her classroom. Is there a new gadget you’re interested in experimenting with in the new year with your students? The Glass Explorer program looks to be taking more inquiries of interest-more information here if you want to try out what Margaret’s doing at her school. Hour of Code You’d be amazed to watch the engineers at the Wikispaces office do their thing, and we’re always excited to see opportunities arise for more students to learn the magic of programming themselves. In honor of Computer Science Education Week, educators are invited to host an Hour of Code in their classrooms during the week of Dec. 9th through 15th. Join the fun here, and let us know how you use wikis to share coding with your students! Just a quick gander at the list of ten fastest growing jobs in the past five years will be reason enough to get your students involved. We hope you’ll check out our Wikispaces Classroom online community for more- free to join, and share any Cyber Monday EdTech goodies you found! Events, gadgets, or just good ideas welcome :) 

Meet Tim King, Head of Computer Studies at Centre Wellington DHS in Fergus, Ontario, Canada. He recently discussed how he is using Wikispaces Classroom for sharing notes with his high school students on his blog, and it was so awesome that we invited him here to  show  other educators how to get going with a similar space for their own class. It all begins on TEJ101morning, his Grade 9 Introduction to Computer Technology Survey course wiki, where he has created a Wikispaces Classroom environment for his students. (Wikispaces Classroom is our newest type of wiki that has extra goodies just for teachers, including a Newsfeed and an Assessment tool. If you already have a wiki, you can turn on the Classroom features by going to Settings->General page and choose "Classroom." You’ll notice you now have a few extra features along the top, including the Assessment tool Tim highlighted. Feel free to check out our tutorial here to learn more.) As a former English teacher, Tim was interested in helping improve the note-taking process with his students. To that end, he had each student pick a chapter of content from their eBook and create a separate wiki page for the portion they were responsible for. On each page, students typed their notes, inserted links, pictures and video while other  students read and edited each other’s. He noticed they were much more engaged in this note-taking process because they were sharing their notes with a  real audience.  During this course, he happened upon our Assessment tool. A picture from Tim King’s blog, http://ugdsbpd.blogspot.ca, showcasing his use of the Wikispaces Classroom Assessment tool. The Assessment tool displays a list of all students in the course and shows their activity on the site in real-time, including when they are reading a page, editing content and everytime a page is saved. He showed it to his students and projected it on his screen during class to give his students instant feedback, which the students promptly got excited about, pushing themselves even further. At the end of this project, Tim noted that  his students’ actual grades improved. Enough of us, Tim shows it so much better! Want to see a step-by-step guide to building this kind of resource? Check out our 15-minute ride through getting the Assessment feature up and running for your students. And a quick tour of the tool is below. If you want to join us for an interactive, hands-on experience with the Assessment tool,  please join us for our 90-minute online course on using Wikispaces Classroom this week. Make and Take: Wikispaces Classroom Online Course 90 minutes of hands-on exploration of a Wikispaces Classroom site. Learn how to interact with the Newsfeed, create Projects, and track student progress with Assessments. A longer session means more time to play, and you’ll even earn a Certificate of Completion afterwards! Time: Wednesday, Dec 18th, 7pm Pacific Standard Time (Thursday, Dec. 19th, 2pm Sydney time) Click here to find out what time it will be for you! Register Here

Jessica Sullivan teaches high school Biology and serves as Science Department Head at Escuela Campo Alegre, the American International school of Caracas, Venezuela. Escuela Campo Alegre is a small (600 students) Pre-K through 12th grade English language international school primarily serving the children of expatriate families working for diplomatic agencies and international corporations. The students at Escuela Campo Alegre (ECA) come from 40 different countries and the teaching faculty represents 12 different nationalities. ECA is a one-to-one laptop school for grades 6-12, employs three full time curriculum technology integration specialists, and provides ongoing support and training in technology for the faculty. It also utilizes Wikispaces Campus service, a school-wide wiki solution providing wikis and accounts for teachers and students. Jessica has presented her work on designing course websites to international teachers in Venezuela and Argentina. In March she heads to Sao Paulo, Brazil for the Association of American Schools in South America to present Twitter Basics for Teachers: Using Twitter to Engage Students and Build Class Community. Follow Jessica on Twitter https://twitter.com/sullyteachbio! Hello from Caracas, Venezuela! I teach International Baccalaureate Biology at Escuela Campo Alegre to a diverse group of students from around the world. ECA uses Wikispaces as our web platform to communicate with students and parents as well as our virtual learning portal during both planned and unexpected school closures. I began using Wikispaces in October of 2010 during my first year at ECA. Teachers at ECA had previously been expected to have a website for their courses, but there was not a common webhosting service or format required. As part of our transition to a more unified digital front and in preparation for anticipated school closures, we all moved to Wikispaces Campus during the fall semester of 2010. I wanted to create an online space that was an effective communication tool with students and parents and a planning and organization system for myself. Through my own trial and error I developed a working infrastructure that supported student learning and made my life as a teacher a bit easier. Below I have outlined key elements of my Wiki organization as a tool for both my students and myself. Effective Use of Homepage Prime Real Estate Like many teachers, I didn’t know what to do with the white space in the center of my newly assigned wiki. I tried several different things at first and ended up going with the most important content (links to course unit pages) and the most engaging widget (embedded our Twitter newsfeed). Your homepage should engage your students and lead them right to the most important content - which for me is their class work and homework for the day. Appropriate Use of Side Navigation Bar I list links that students may need to access from any page on the wiki on the side navigation bar. These include links to General Resources, IB Biology Exam Preparation, and Advisory Information. Some teachers may prefer to include course links on the side navigation bar and put multimedia content in the main space of the homepage. That would work too - but for me I have found it easiest for students to navigate to and access content information in the center of the main page. Course Organization by Unit I began organizing my wiki pages by unit for each of my classes to decrease the amount of content on each page. Pages kept getting longer as I kept adding the day’s class work and homework. As I switched to organizing content not only by course but also by unit of study, I realized a few unexpected benefits. The main one was that the unit page became both a record and a template for lesson planning for future semesters. It also became a contextualized hub for bookmarking links, documents and animations. Seeing a list of units on the homepage overwhelmed some students, so just this year I began highlighting the current unit so the students know exactly where to go for their course information. Tables, Tables and More Tables! I found the insert table function to be incredibly valuable in organizing the content of my Wiki. By putting content in rows and columns I made better use of the space available across the wiki page. It is also much easier for students to located content in a table format. In fact, when I began working on my Wiki and before I sharing it with students, I asked my students which teachers had the best Wikis on campus. All of the teachers that the students mentioned had the daily class work and homework organized into a table. Now I use tables not only for the class work and homework calendar but also for organization of course units, links and IB Biology resources. Favorite Embedded Widgets My favorite widgets are the Google countdown clock and the embedded Twitter feed. I teach IB Biology which culminates in a series of exams for the International Baccalaureate diploma during May of the students’ senior year. I keep a countdown clock on the homepage of the wiki to keep students on their toes and focused on our goal…arriving prepared for the IB Biology exam! The embedded Twitter feed keeps students engaged with the pictures, reminders, announcements and supplemental course links that I post via Twitter. Students are already inundated with social media notifications and updates so having all of my @sullyteachbio content in one place makes sure my tweets get to their intended audience in a timely manner. As with all things in a teaching, wiki design is a work in progress - it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time, it just has to work a little better than what you were doing before. Keep making small improvements as you learn what works and your Wiki will evolve to be a helpful tool for both you and your students. I hope this helps you in your quest to build a wiki that works for you and your students. Drop me a line at jessicas@ecak12.com or @sullyteachbio - let’s keep the conversation going! Learn more about Wikispaces Campus for your school with Eric on our team next month! Register here.

As of July 1, 2014 we will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) on Wikispaces. Starting June 1st, visitors to any Wikispaces site using IE 8 will see a warning banner linking to this blog post. We will continue to support Internet Explorer versions 9, 10, and 11 as well as modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you are using IE 8 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. Both Chrome and Firefox now automatically update to the latest versions, so you’ll never be left behind again if you switch. Internet Explorer 8 was released five years ago in March 2009. Microsoft has since released three new major IE versions, with IE 11 launching in late 2013. Given the tiny percentage of visitors who still use IE 8 on Wikispaces, we can’t continue to justify the amount of work that is required to maintain support. We try to be very conservative in ending browser support to minimize impact on those who cannot switch, especially on Windows. Here we believe we’re in good company. Google Apps, for example, dropped support for IE 8 in late 2012! If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@wikispaces.com.