TES Labs is a new platform that engages the most important people in education - teachers - to share their ideas and expertise with entrepreneurs. The result will be better products and services for the classroom. On the site, start-ups ask teachers from all over the world for feedback on their products, which are automatically matched up to registered teachers based on their profiles, through short weekly surveys. The start-ups will then be able to act on the advice they are given, while teachers will be entered into regular prize draws. TES Labs Example: Propagate (www.mypropagate.com) TES Labs is hosting Propagate, (www.mypropagate.com) a startup keen to hear from teachers about how it can better hone its products to suit their needs. The technology Propagate has developed allows teachers to set up word lists for pupils to memorize that are designed to be more intuitive than flash cards or normal workbooks. The system highlights specific words that a teacher wants students to learn as they read a piece of text online. It can provide real-time explanations of what words mean, and sets quizzes to strengthen students’ understanding by placing words in context. Emily Schu, co-founder of Propagate, said the digital tool was currently at beta-testing stage, and she hoped that input from teachers on TES Labs would allow her team to better tailor the concept. "Getting ongoing feedback from teachers will allow us to develop our product and tweak certain functionality," Ms Schu said. "We can launch it, but then iterate it and customize it to help teachers get the most out of our product." Teachers, Please Try It Out! Please visit www.tes.co.uk/labs and sign up, then give us feedback on this new platform! Tell us what you think about the site and the questionnaires in the comments section below!

Adding Members to Your Wiki Wikispaces offers easy ways to add new Members to your Classroom wikis. First, let’s start with a quick refresher on some terminology. A User is defined as anyone with a username and password for wikispaces.com. When you go to wikispaces.com and log in, you are signing into your User account. Anyone can create a User account for free. When a User joins a wiki using one of the methods below, they become a Member of that wiki. A single User can be a Member of any number of wikis on wikispaces.com. Membership for your wiki can mean different things. If your wiki is Protected, all Users can view its content, but only Members will be able to edit. If your wiki is Private, only Members will be able to view and edit content. More information about permission settings can be found here. Now let’s have a look at how to add new Members. The Invitation Tool A Wikispaces classic. Just use the + button next to the Members link and paste in the username or email address of the Users you would like to make Members of this wiki. It’s the perfect way to announce to a specific audience that your new wiki is up and running. The Invite Code A new tool for Organizers to add a group of new Members into their wiki in one swoop. Organizers can activate a temporary join code from their wiki’s settings area, pass out the code during their class or meeting so Users can navigate to the wiki and enter this code to become a Member of the wiki. More info can be found here. The User Creator If your students do not have Wikispaces User accounts, this tool will allow you to create them in bulk. The new accounts will already have a membership to your wiki when they sign in! First, create a spreadsheet or list of the unique usernames, passwords and email addresses (the latter is optional) that you would like to use for your student roster and then: Go to your wiki and click the Settings link. Click the User Creator link Select the appropriate wiki from the Which wikis do you want to add users to? drop down menu and click the +Add Another Wiki button for updating members on multiple spaces. Paste in the usernames or upload the spreadsheet containing these usernames and click Continue. Select the column containing users names. Do not worry about email addresses or passwords - there will be no changes made to existing accounts. Click Continue You will be notified about any errors (existing usernames, unaccepted characters, etc.). Make any appropriate changes, if needed. Click Create Users And for our Private Label and Campus users, you can automatically add memberships to existing Users from the Site Administration area and bypass the invitation process entirely. The Wiki Details page Go to Site Administration. Click the Search link under the Wikis heading. Search for the wiki you would like to add this user to. Hover your mouse over the wiki name and click the Details link that appears. Scroll down to Add a New Member. Type or paste in the username and click Add.

This is a guest post written by Niall Watts of the University College Dublin. Niall describes a great use of Wikispaces by Dr. Niamh Flanagan of the UCD School of Applied Social Science. He describes how Wikispaces was flexible enough to provide students a simple structure to organize their research, share and analyze surveys, and then present their findings. Dr. Niamh Flanagan of the UCD School of Applied Social Science wanted students in the first and second years of their Masters in Social Science (Social Work) to work together on the Student-2-Student Dialogue Project. The aim of this project was to investigate learning opportunities while on fieldwork placement. The first year students designed a survey for the second year students to complete on their experiences of field work. The first year students were divided into 10 research teams of about 5 members to analyze and discuss the survey findings. Each team was responsible for researching one topic. Topics included guidance and learning on placement, student preparedness for field work placements and practice supervision while on placement among others. The second year students were to comment on the findings of the first year students. It was hoped that the research would help to prepare the first year students for their own fieldwork placements. Blackboard could not be used for the project, as it involved students from two years who were not all registered in the same module. Media Services identified Wikispaces as a suitable platform for such a collaborative project. Wikispaces allows a lecturer to organize students into project teams where they can collaboratively write documents. Permissions can be set so that teams can read but not write on each other’s team pages and reviewers (in this case the second year students) can read and comment on all the team pages. Wikispaces has a simple editor which allows the addition of pictures, tables, links and other media elements. It is free for use in education. Niamh Flanagan considers the project to be a success and would repeat it. All the first year teams created a team page or pages with a detailed analysis of their findings. Most were illustrated with graphics and tables. The only downside was the small number of comments by second year students perhaps due to other study commitments. Niamh Flanagan spent no more than a day or two familiarizing herself with Wikispaces. Niall Watts from Media Services, UCD IT Services, supported the project, including a brief demonstration of Wikispaces to the students which helped them to get started. No major technical hitches were encountered during the project. For further information on this project, please contact Niamh Flanagan or Niall Watts. Original link: http://www.ucdblogs.org/ucdblogs/collaborative-online-project-years/

Not every user will use your wiki the same way. A page may be useful to one user, but not to another. Our Favorite Pages feature will allow every user to show just those pages they care about in the navigation area. The navigation area of your wiki will contain the navigation widget by default. It lists all of the pages on your wiki or those associated with a specified tag. You may have also noticed the "Favorites" heading at the top. If you have not discovered it before, this is a really handy feature to make your most used pages easier to reach! Unlike the rest of the navigation area, the Favorites page list is unique for every user. Each user can determine what their favorite pages are, creating a personal list of their most visited pages. To add a page to your favorites, click the star just to the left of the page title. The page will now appear in the navigation area under the favorites page. To remove a page from your Favorites, simply click the star again. Need to contact us? You are always welcome to send your questions to help@wikispaces.com.

    How do you use technology in your classroom? We are always interested in learning about how teachers work with education technology, and ed-tech companies. It’s key to being a good ed-tech provider and is always a great reality check. If you’d like to help, please fill out our latest survey. Your responses will be treated as confidential unless you choose to provide your name and would like us to quote you. It should take no more than 10 minutes, and if you want to provide your contact details, you’ll have a chance to win one of three iPads. Take the Survey As always, thank you for your support!  

Robert Maloy started the Resources for History Teachers wiki in 2009. This is his Wikispaces story. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: resourcesforhistoryteachers is a wiki designed for teachers and students, created by teachers and students. Robert Maloy, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began resourcesforhistoryteachers in 2009 as part of a course designed to help college students prepare for the Massachusetts History Teacher Test. Since that time, resourcesforhistoryteachers has grown beyond its initial focus to become a multimedia/multicultural history learning resource for teachers, students and schools throughout the United States and around the world: The site now includes all of the Massachusetts history standards for grades K-12 as well as the national Advanced Placement (AP) World History, United States History and American Government standards. There are more than 600 pages in the site and the number is constantly growing as users contribute new information and create subpages off main pages. Users of the wiki come from a wide-ranging community of educators committed to developing interesting and engaging curriculum for students studying history, government, economics and geography. The site now features links to multicultural and multimedia resources as well as short summaries of historical events, making it an interactive and engaging experience for history learners. There are links to primary sources, video resources, learning games, resources for teaching the histories of diverse people, historical biographies and many more materials for use in school classrooms. The goal is for teachers and students to have multiple resources for covering, uncovering and discovering the past. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Being able to create cross-links between pages is an exciting feature. Teachers and students can access information about an historical topic on one page and then explore more connections about that topic on related pages. Giving users the option to explore the pages in their own way makes this site a unique type of digital textbook for use in schools. Students can follow their own interests as explorers of the past through the lens of multiple types of learning resources. The option to add images to the pages is another favorite feature. Pictures, maps, and other visual resources serve to bring historical material alive for teachers and students while creating visually engaging pages within the wiki. We also like the idea of creating subpages off a main page so that teachers and students can explore a specific topic in more depth by leaving the main page to read and explore the subpage. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We have found that the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki can be paired with other Web 2.0 tools to create engaging history learning experiences. One idea is what we call a Wikiquest. Like a WebQuest, students explore multiple online resources as part of a class assignment. But in a Wikiquest, students do their explorations within the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki, both accessing existing materials and adding new ones so that the wiki becomes a regularly evolving digital text and learning resource. A second idea involves using the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki in conjunction with social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo. Teachers and students can assemble collections of web materials on their social bookmarking site and then link that material to wiki. This is enabled teachers and students to create stacks of resources about historical figures (historical biography stacks) or events (historical event stacks). Students in classrooms can follow each other social bookmarks while all the wiki users can also access the material. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Wikis create ongoing opportunities for interaction and collaboration that result in powerful learning for teachers and students. Instead of a teacher lecturing about historical material or telling students to read online sources by themselves, wikis invite students to construct knowledge together by actively exploring existing resources and adding new ones to a public site that everyone can access and use. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Active learning, critical thinking, and collaborative interaction are the hallmarks of how the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki functions as a transformative technology for history learning by teachers and students. Wikis make historical knowledge visible and accessible to teachers and students who are both the creators and the receivers of that knowledge.

We have a great, early opportunity for teachers who are interested in selling their high-quality, original teaching materials on the new TES Resources. We are launching TES Resources in the US very soon, and teachers selling and sharing on TES Resources will be able to reach an audience of millions worldwide. We are particularly excited to hear from US teachers, but we are happy to hear from teachers from all over the world. As an early adopter, we’ll work with you through the process of organizing your materials, uploading and categorizing them, and helping you be successful as you make them available for sale. You’ll also be an invaluable part of the process we go through to make sure we build the best platform possible for teachers of all kinds. If you’re interested, fill out our form and we’ll be in touch with you shortly. We want to work with both experienced teachers and new teachers and we want to work with teachers of every grade level and subject so that we can learn how to best serve teachers everywhere. Most importantly, we’re looking for teachers who have created their own teaching materials and are interested in selling them to teachers around the world. If you have any interest, don’t hesitate to apply! Wikispaces has always been about helping teachers manage their classrooms and work with their students. Now, we are working to help teachers find and share the materials they need to engage their class and energize their lessons. We look forward to working with you on this exciting project. Fill out our application form now.

We need your help! We’re currently working on an exciting new project to help educators find and use peer-developed teaching resources. We need feedback from teachers to make sure we’re on the right track. The link below leads to a brief survey, which should take about 10 minutes. Take the survey.  Please complete the survey before 5pm PST on Friday July 17, 2015. We can’t do what we do without your feedback. Thank you! The Wikispaces team

We’re excited to invite you and all the teachers on Wikispaces to join TES, the largest online community of educators in the world. Create an account today to start uploading your original teaching materials. It’s easy to begin: Create a TES account Upload your resources Earn 100% royalty on every U.S. purchase Become an early member and you’ll: Get extra help organizing and marketing your materials Have the opportunity to provide feedback on our platform Later this summer, we’ll be opening up our marketplace to educators to browse, download, and purchase your resources on TES. We’ve been busy working on this new product and look forward to sharing it with you! If you have any questions, check out our FAQs, or contact us.

Whether you’re new to selling teaching materials online or a seasoned pro, our Content team will help you be as successful as possible in our new marketplace. They’ll provide individualized feedback, so you’ll reach more educators with your resources. You’ll get a full return on all your efforts because you’ll earn 100% royalty on every U.S. purchase. When you create a TES account, our Content team will help you: - identify teaching materials to sell and your target audience - optimize your resources, including content, pricing and descriptions - create your own personal brand Join the TES marketplace now and connect with our Content team members: Erica, Gabe, and Ritu. They look forward to meeting you! Learn more about Erica, Gabe, and Ritu below. We’ll introduce more members of the TES family from the San Francisco office in future posts! Erica Magnusson Team: Content Bio: Erica started teaching biology and literacy in a rural village in Malawi, Africa and marine conservancy on whale watching expeditions in MA during college. She then became a Teach For America corps member and was a teacher for four years at an inner-city school in San Francisco. She taught ninth grade Biology and Leadership to a diverse, enthusiastic, and inspiring group of students. High School: Sanborn Regional High School, Fremont, NH College: Eckerd College, B.S. in Biology and Environmental Studies, Minor in Human Development Grad School: Loyola Marymount University, M.Ed in Urban Administration and Policy Favorite Teacher: Professor Nancy Janus of Eckerd College, for teaching me that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Gabe Baker Team: Content Bio: Gabe started teaching Latin, English, and History to middle and high schoolers in Los Angeles after college. Two years later, he taught middle school on a boat that traveled the world (no lie). Having had his fill of boat life, he attended grad school to study online learning environments. He has also designed web-based curriculum for Curriculet and taught at the Great Books Summer Program at Stanford University and Oxford University for the past nine summers. High School: Boiling Springs High School, Carlisle, PA College: Oberlin College, B.A. in Classical Studies & B.A. in Comparative Literature Grad School: University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A. in Education Favorite Teacher: Professor Jason Raley of UCSB, for truly believing that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for living the life of the mind inside and outside of the classroom. Ritu Virmani Team: Content Bio: Ritu has taught for 9 years, beginning her teaching career as a sixth grade Math teacher at an inner-city charter school in Washington DC. The following two years took her to Dubai, where she taught middle school Math and Science at an all-girls school (many of her students were real-life princesses!). Ritu also taught at the Siena School for students with language-based learning differences in the DC area and worked with dyslexic students at the Charles Armstrong School in San Francisco. High School: John F. Kennedy High School, Silver Spring, MD College: University of Maryland, B.A. in Communication Grad School: The Johns Hopkins University, M.A. Teaching Favorite Teacher: Mr. Bowman is an extraordinary teacher who showed me the importance of small successes, laughing at oneself, and that failure is a stepping stone to great things!