On Tuesday, October 26, 2010 from 1-2 p.m. PDT, we’re holding a down and dirty Private Label webinar. No frills, no extras: just one hour with our Private Label experts. We’ll take the product through its paces, so you get a chance to see how it works and how you can make it do whatever your organization needs from a wiki environment. And, of course, we’ll be ready to answer all your questions about Wikispaces Private Label for organizations. Pound for pound, it’s just about the best value you can get from a free webinar. If you’re still making up your mind about what to do on October 26, you should sign up today.

If communication isn’t the key to success, it certainly is key to success. And that’s why we’ve recently added a site mailing feature to every Wikispaces Private Label site. Here’s how it works: Go to Site Administration. On the Users tab, you’ll find a link that says Send Email to Site Users. Click it. This will take you to the main site mailings page, where you’ll find a list of all the site emails that have been sent, and their status (the most recent mailing will always be on top). You can also draft a new mailing when you hit the Add New button. Your first decision with a new mailing is who’s going to receive it. These are your options: All users: The email will be sent to everyone with an account on your site. All members of any wiki: The email will be sent to anyone who is listed as a member of any wiki on the site. Organizers: The email will be sent to all of your wiki organizers. Site administrators: The email will only be sent to site administrators. Yourself (for testing): No one will see the email but you. (Your email will only be sent to confirmed email addresses — so make sure that your users are confirming their email addresses on your site.) Enter the subject line and body like you would for any other email. Review your work with the Preview button, then you can Start Mailing, Continue Editing, or just Cancel. And that’s it! It’s a simple but effective tool for keeping your users up to date on important site information. As always, if you have any questions, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

Joyce Valenza started the Copyrightfriendly wiki in August of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I use the Copyright Friendly pathfinder to support student and teacher media creation. Our students are deeply involved in digital storytelling and sharing the results of their research in media. They need access to the quickly growing number of portals of copyleft and public domain images, music, sound effects and video. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Although I haven’t used it much in this particular wiki, I embed like crazy in most of my other wikis. (See our Virtual Library.) That little embed icon is my personal favorite and a happy spot for most of our learners too. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Our students are using wikis as parking lots/looseleaf notebooks for their major research projects. (See this blog post.) Wikis allow students to gather and store media of all types — including their video reflections on the process, their final knowledge products — and they allow for transparency and interactivity. Wikis seem to be our basic building platform for aggregating so many of the other 2.0 tools — glogs, digital stories, online calendars, polls, RSS feeds, and so much more. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I said it today when Allison discovered she could easily embed feeds from soldiers’ blogs in Afghanistan to help support her research and her cigar drive in honor of her older brother who returns soon. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Go to sleep, Joyce!

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from October: Books, Libraries, and Reading It’s October, which means that it’s just turned cold and drizzly here in San Francisco. Perfect book weather. It sounds like a lot of you were thinking the same thing: edtech VISION: Got books? Promoting YA literature using Technology Naomi Harm: "Bookleads http://bookleads.wikispaces.com/ and Reading 2.0 http://readingtech.wikispaces.com the power of story into your classroom #edtech" Steven V. Kaszynski: "Webinar: Brick and Mortar School Libraries in the Digital Age http://tlvirtualcafe.wikispaces.com/Changed+But+Still+Critical #libraries" Emma: "Book club is updated and ready to go for October. Great time to join: http://missprint.wikispaces.com/" International Projects Part of what makes wikis so neat is that you don’t have to be in the same locality to work together. Here are some of the awesome projects you’ve been talking about that are built on the idea of international collaboration: Autumn Scheer: "Check out http://greetingsfromtheworld.wikispaces.com for some really cool glogsters about other cultures. Croatia is very beautiful!" Fiona McDonald: "@CorrieB awesome, add your name http://globalmythchallenge.wikispaces.com/" Art and Graphics Sometimes you need beautiful graphics to add clarity and communicate. Sometimes you just want to waste a few minutes (or hours) looking at something pretty. In both of those times, these wikis are there for you: Peter Vogel: "A wikispaces collection of art and drawing resources sites: http://bit.ly/83MlhB" Julie Rogier: "Excellent resource to save: free online tools and devices compiled by a fellow #MSU Spartan http://freevisualtools.wikispaces.com/" Resources for Teachers We love educators, and we love the way you share your thoughts, references, and experiences. We wanted to pass on a just a few that we’ve run across this month: bcnpaul1′s blog: teaching in a barefoot world - teaching journal part 1 NJ Tech Teacher Musings: Social Media Benefits Mike Mcilveen: "@msjweir Thx! http://teachmath20.wikispaces.com/ is amazing! Will retweet and distribute. #math" Cammy Monroy: "Found a great wiki with lots of links to free technology tools for use in the classroom: http://udltechtoolkit.wikispaces.com/" Rochelle Jensen: "thanks to the authors of http://owt.wikispaces.com/ Great ideas to support the writing process" Happy October (and November) everyone! We’re off to curl up with a cup of cocoa.

The TwitterEd wiki is an online resource for educators interested in using Twitter as a teaching tool. We asked Shireen Richardson to tell us about it: The "Twittered" wiki was set up following a Masters of Education unit, "New Technologies in Education and Training." It was my component of a group project titled "Social Networking in Schools," and was a huge learning curve for me. For a start, although I volunteered to look at using Twitter in education, I didn’t have a Twitter account, knew very little about Twitter, and had never used it before! (I have to give a lot of credit to Carol Cooper-Taylor, as it was her excellent YouTube clip, "Tweaking Twitter for Teachers," that gave me my first understanding of Twitter.) The group began by working in Google Docs, another "first" for me. Then, when the project became too large to manage, a wiki was established for ease of communication, organization, and collaboration. I had never used a wiki before. What I instantly loved about using a wiki was how easy it was to use and the fact that you could find really clear help topics and tutorials on what you wanted to do, as the need arose. Sadly, the group I was working with chose to submit the assignment in the form of a PowerPoint, with slides on each of the social networking components. Personally, I would have liked to have polished and submitted the wiki that we had used for collaboration. When the project was over, I thought it was a pity that work I had done would no longer have a purpose, hence the wiki "Twittered." Most recently, I have completed another study. For this, I have been working on extending my ICT knowledge and skills further by investigating how wikis can be used in literacy to engage students in text studies. I introduced my year 7 English students to wikis, which they have been using in response to their text, Chinese Cinderella. This project has been extremely successful. Every lesson, students ask if they can work on their wikis (almost beg!) and have even spent their after school time voluntarily working on them. For this study, I was required to produce and deliver a professional development session to colleagues, using PowerPoint. This has resulted in colleagues eagerly wanting to use wikis in their classes. Whilst constructing the PowerPoint, I was aware that if I had a choice of delivery, it would in fact be using a wiki and not PowerPoint. Therefore, I set up a wiki that could be used in future presentations or for colleagues wanting to revisit information from the session.

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 from 3-4 p.m. PST (11 PM-12 AM UTC), join our very own Sarah Cove for an information webinar on Wikispaces Private Label. Sarah’s prepared some examples of popular uses for wikis in education, business, and nonprofits. And she’s really excited about the Q&A session, where you can test her knowledge with any and all questions about Private Label sites, from features to function to formatting. It’s bound to be illuminating, and fun. If you’re free on November 10, you should go ahead and sign up today.

We just added a new widget to your wiki toolbox. We call it the List of Wikis widget, because that’s what it does: it puts a list of wikis on the page. No more manually entering links to wikis, no more worrying about who sees what. What it does Obviously, it lists wikis. You get two choices: All the wikis the viewer is a member of, or all the wikis in the viewer’s "My Wikis" list. But the fun part is that it’s a dynamic little widget. So when I’m logged in, I’ll see the wikis I care about seeing. When you’re logged in, you’ll see yours. And, when either of us joins new wikis, or leaves old wikis, or updates our list of favorite wikis, the widget will automatically know. How it works Navigate to the page (or navigation bar) where you want a list of wikis. Click the Widget icon in the editor toolbar. On the Wikispaces Widgets menu, select List of Wikis. Decide which list you want to display and set the maximum number of wikis to list. Hit the Embed Wiki List button. Save your page. A special feature for Private Label users If you are working on a Wikispaces Private Label site, you have one additional option for your list of wikis: All wikis the viewer can see. This can be a fantastic solution to tricky site navigation issues. All you need to do is embed the widget on the home page or nav bar of your www wiki, and every user will get an instant, personalized list of all the wikis that are public, protected, or list them as a member. The whole visible site at their fingertips, and you didn’t have to spend any time entering manual links or worrying about wiki permission settings. We’re pretty psyched about this new feature, and hope you will be, too. Let us know what you think below or with an email to help@wikispaces.com.

You want your wiki to look attractive, and you want it to work hard. One simple way to accomplish both of those goals is by adding links to your images to turn them into buttons. And you can do that with the skills you already have. Here’s how: A refresher course in links You are almost certainly using links in your wikis already. They make it possible to move between pages, from wiki to wiki, even to other resources elsewhere on the Internet. Adding a link is very easy to do: Highlight the text you want to turn into a link. Hit the Link icon in the editor toolbar. If you’re linking to a page in your wiki (or another wiki), fill out the information in the Wiki Link tab. If you’re linking to a page on another Web site, move over to the External Link tab and put in the information there. Hit the Add link button. Finish editing your page, and Save! (You can find more details about specific ways to add links on our help page.) Getting ready Before you can link an image, you have to have an image that you want to use. Any type of image file will make a good link: .jpg, .gif, .png — whatever you’re comfortable with or have ready to go. It’s best if your image is set to the size you want it to appear on the page before you upload it to your wiki. You can always make the image larger or smaller once it’s on the page, but, depending on the type and size of the image, it might end up looking pixilated or strange. The right size for an image depends on where and how you want to use it. For example, we recommend that you set images in your navigation bar to no more than 180 pixels wide. But, really, any image — no matter what the size, file type, or subject matter happens to be — can be made into a link with a few easy steps. A few easy steps Are you ready? Here it goes: On the page where you want to put the link, hit the Edit button. Decide where you want the image to go. Make sure that’s where your cursor is, and hit the File button in the editor toolbar. Click the Upload Files button and select the image you want to use from your computer. Once it’s uploaded, click on the thumbnail and file name in the list to insert it into your page. If you want, click on the image, then use the file details box to adjust the size and alignment of your image. With the image still selected (so you can still see the file details box), click the Link icon in the editor toolbar. Select the Wiki Link or External Link tab, and add the link information just like you would with a text link. Click Add Link. Finish editing the page, and hit Save. Just for funsies, click on your image. Linked! Some ideas for linked images Probably the single most popular way people use linked images is to add graphical buttons to the navigation bar. We have an entire page devoted to nav bar changes in our help wiki. But that’s not all you can do. You can put together a page introducing your classroom, with a piece of student art representing each student. When you click on a student’s artwork, BAM!, it takes you to that student’s e-portfolio. Or say you’re setting up a product catalog for your company’s public-facing wiki. You can add product photos to your home page that will take the customer to a page that lists the specifications for that product. Or maybe you just want to add a little bit of flair to your page. Why settle for a text link that says "Click here," when you can have a Big Red Button? Linked images are a simple way to add polish and pizazz. Let us know how you’re using links with a comment below or an email to help@wikispaces.com.

Michael Uleau started the Urspace wiki in July of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: My group of users are high school science students. The wiki was designed to be a one-stop information warehouse, where students could share their ideas and keep track of what’s going on in class. We use the wiki to link to all our important information and create projects that other students can use as a resource for even more projects. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The ability to add RSS feeds is the greatest! Feeds make the wiki dynamic and provide current topics for reports. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We use Google forms for quizzes, Glogster to give our projects some pizazz, and Scribd to embed documents. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Whenever I see students working on projects at home, even when they don’t have to, I smile. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? My wiki would ask me what its grade was. An A of course!

We do a lot of talking about Wikispaces Private Label, and we’ve got a lot of ways to explain what it is: a complete wiki environment, a network of linked wikis with central administration, a wiki solution for organizations… Of course, everyone knows that the best way to get to know anything is to try it out for yourself. This is the second-best way: This video will be living in our help wiki. If you want to start a free trial and explore Wikispaces Private Label on your own, you can try it out here.

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from November: 21st Century Learning Several of you are thinking about what it means to be a teacher in a 21st century classroom. And your thoughts on the subject make for some excellent reading: Instructify: Instructifeature: International classroom collaboration on the worldwide web My Life in a D School: Yep… I Qualify! Technoteaching: 18 reasons to use a wiki for sharing learning materials iPhones and iPads in Education New technology in the classroom can be exciting, which is why so many of you are sharing your favorite resources for using smart phones and mobile devices in education: Steven W. Anderson: "iPods, iPhones and iPads in Education: http://bit.ly/ckAgj" Susan Watt: "Amazingly creative iPod/iPad ideas to use with students shared by @Gill_Ville! Find them at http://ipodproject.wikispaces.com/ #ECOO2010″ L ATI: "R u using iPad for students w/disab? Apps, tutorials and more at http://mobilelearning4specialneeds.wikispaces.com/." Steven W. Anderson: "Another Great List Of iPod and iPad Apps For Education: http://bit.ly/9QyhIg #mlearning" Digital Storytelling The huge variety of audio, video, and other media and widgets available on the web makes it possible to share personal stories in a meaningful and even interactive way. You’ve mentioned some excellent resources and projects around digital storytelling: dmcordell: "New wiki (a work in progress) http://usingdigitalimages.wikispaces.com/ #digitalstorytelling #digitalimages #tlchat #edchat" Gareth Morlais: "One year ago today: http://mindsonmedia.wikispaces.com" Alan Levine: "@LFields0925 http://50ways.wikispaces.com and various presos at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/50ways" dmcordell: "@mrplough07 There’s more stuff here http://usingdigitalimages.wikispaces.com/Storytelling+Tools+and+Resources" Just Cool And then, of course, there are some people doing things with wikis that are just exciting to hear about. Here are a few: The MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, MA — Rep. Sannicandro creates ‘wiki’ page for voter input OSMHI: "Voices4Hope is a forum for young adults with mental health challenges to talk and share information, http://voices4hope.wikispaces.com/" Audrey Nay: "RT @keisawilliams: C what happens when librarians crowd source a wiki…someone alphabetizes navigation bar http://bit.ly/ara2cr #tlchat" Keep up those great projects, and keep sharing your secrets, tips, and resources. It’s been a great November!

On Tuesday, December 7 at 10 a.m. PST (18:00 UTC), we will be holding an hour-long Private Label training webinar. Sarah Cove will walk you through a guided tour of the basics of Private Label site administration, show off a few of the more advanced features, and demonstrate a few use cases for wikis in large organizations. Then there will be a Q&A session, so start saving up your questions now. Whether you’re curious about Wikispaces Private Label, or you’re just looking for some new pointers on your existing site, why don’t you join us on December 7. Sign up today.

Erin Schollaert’s Chantzmultimedia wiki gives students a chance to be journalists and create a multimedia newspaper. The students’ newspaper was just published to the public on December 1, so we asked Erin to tell us about it: Recently I transferred to a new position in my building. I used to teach English, but I when I was given the opportunity to teach multimedia to 8th graders, I jumped at it. At the time I switched positions, the administration in my district was revising the curriculum; so again, I was given another fabulous opportunity to create a class that is enriched with Web 2.0 technology and 21st century teaching and learning. The eighth grade multimedia class is an opportunity for students to use a wikispace to publish an online newspaper. It is a remarkably easy way for kids to collaborate with one another while trying out new technology. Students are placed in groups of 3: a writer, a podcaster, and a photographer. Each group is responsible for coming up with a topic to write about, to podcast about, and to photograph. Once all three jobs are done, students publish their work under the appropriate link in the wiki. Then they change jobs and repeat the process until each student has done each job once. After 12 weeks, our wiki is made public for students, parents, and community members to read. This production process is enriched with both 21st century teaching and learning practices. Students are given a task and the tools to complete the task, but how they get there is dependent upon their own learning style. Formal roles are assigned in the collaborative learning groups, and students are forced to use problem solving skills using real data. Since the students are working in groups made up of different types of learners, they are using integrated learning systems as well. The Web 2.0 technology, along with the 21st century learning skills, act as productivity tools, which in turn allows for the teacher to act as a facilitator of learning to begin the process of incorporating 21st century teaching skills. The process continues to repeat as students switch roles. It is fascinating to see the differentiated instruction that is happening while students complete the different tasks. One student in a group accomplishes a task one way while another accomplishes the exact same task in a completely different way. We have had many wonderful experiences with our wiki. The best thing about our experience is the collaboration. We can spend time proofreading and searching for mistakes, which creates a cross curricular, interdisciplinary approach to learning. This is very tough to accomplish in elective classes, and the best part of it is that since there is a place for online discussion, the students are very receptive to the opportunity. Web 2.0 technology, especially our wikispace, has provided a safe online environment for my students to collaborate and share their ideas with many people while developing 21st century skills. It has made a huge difference in our learning community.

Monitoring a page or a wiki is a wonderful way to stay informed about what’s happening with the projects you care about. Whether you’re on a Private Label site or organizing a single wiki on Wikispaces.com — or even just participating as a member in a bunch of different wikis — you may have learned to depend on those little emailed notices that a page has been changed, or someone has added to an ongoing conversation. They let you know what’s going on, as it happens. But if you’re monitoring a whole lot of pages, wikis, and discussions, or if the wikis you’re monitoring are particularly active, it can sometimes feel like you’re trapped in an avalanche of emails. Your inbox fills up before you have a chance to check every change, and important edits or comments can be lost in the flow. Not anymore! Go to My Account and scroll down. After Email Monitored Changes you’ll find a new option: "Yes — one email per day." Select that option, and hit the Save button. Now, instead of getting a new email every time a change is made to something you’re monitoring, you’ll just get one single email, every day, with a summary of all your monitored changes. Your daily digest of changes is easy to read (or scan), and lists every single edit and comment you’ve chosen to monitor, in the order that they were made. It’s a simple and effective way to manage activity on the wikis you care about. If you have any questions about monitoring your wikis, shoot us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

As part of its Open Government Initiative, the White House has just launched the ExpertNet wiki. With this wiki, the American public can help discover new and better ways to open up communication between the government and the people. You can read more about the ExpertNet wiki and the Open Government Initiative on the White House blog. We at Wikispaces are excited about this project, and extremely proud that our product will be a part of it.

In honor of the holiday season and in preparation for the upcoming term, instead of our usual monthly tips and tricks post we decided to bring you a roundup of some of our favorite resources for educators who are getting to know wikis. We’re still figuring out how to wrap it. Enjoy! Getting Started What is a wiki?: Common Craft explains Our free K-12 plan: Explore for yourself — for free! How to work on Wikispaces: Our video tours Creating user accounts for students: Check our help page or this blog post Projects and tools Hundreds of examples of wikis in education: educationalwikis Huge collection of Web 2.0 tools and widgets: cooltoolsforschools Multimedia posters you can embed with a handy widget: Glogster Wikis for your entire school (or district) Wikispaces Private Label for K-12 Training your teachers Wikispaces Private Label in action: Birmingham Public Schools and our case study of BPS General wiki help Read our archive of blog posts with the Tips and Tricks tag Take a look at the awesome wikis we’ve featured Find out what else is happening in the Wikispaces Community Find helpful advice and walkthroughs on our help wiki And we always look forward to hearing from you at help@wikispaces.com!

If you’re using Wikispaces Private Label, you may want to restrict your site to the members of your organization, but you know the last thing your users need is another password to remember. Previously, if you wanted your users to access your Private Label site with the accounts they already have, you could use our Single Sign-On integration to connect to your authentication server. It’s a powerful feature, but it does require a good bit of configuration. Now, if your organization is storing user accounts in an LDAP directory (such as OpenLDAP or ActiveDirectory), you can give your users this same access with virtually no setup — all you have to do is fill out a simple form. Go to Site Administration and click the Authentication link under Settings. You’ll see a form that allows you to add an authentication source. Choose LDAP and fill out the required information. Once you have an LDAP source set up, you won’t need to invite users or get them to set up accounts — all the users in your LDAP directory are essentially members of your site already. All they need to do is log into the site with the username and password they already have. You can also allow users from outside your organization to create accounts in the usual way, or even set up more than one LDAP source if you want to allow users in multiple directories to access your site. Our help page will walk you through the form. It’s easy to set up, so go give it a try. And as always, if you have any questions, let us know at help@wikispaces.com.

If your organization has a Wikispaces Private Label site and already has an existing user database, for several years we’ve given you an option to integrate the two. But this convenience came with a small drawback: if you wanted the benefits of Single Sign-On, you were limited to a single database of users — or a lot of complicated development to make several databases behave like a solitary unit. The goal of Wikispaces has always been to provide a powerful, functional, flexible platform for collaboration. Across silos, between departments, inside and outside your organization, with third parties and other organizations, even over national boundaries. And sometimes all these users can’t be easily contained with a single user database. And that is why we are so excited to announce that, starting this month, we’ve made it easy to integrate your Private Label site with multiple authentication sources, simultaneously. So if you already have an LDAP directory for most of your users, but you know you’ll want to invite guests to collaborate with you, it’s no problem. You don’t have to add the guests to your LDAP directory, you don’t have to compromise the privacy of your site, and you don’t have to worry about cumbersome development. Just enable both authentication sources, and you’re ready to go. So if you have multiple LDAP servers, go ahead and hook them all up. Want to allow OpenID access? Not a problem. Need to open up your school site to parents, community resources, classrooms in other countries? There is nothing stopping you. Our help page will show you how to open your Private Label site to multiple authentication sources. And you can always email us at help@wikispaces.com if you have any questions.

Gwyneth Jones started the Daring Librarian wiki in October of 2006. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: The Daring Librarian’s Steam Powered Wiki in a Digitally Shifted World is a professional development technology wiki to support the teachers and admin of Murray Hill Middle School in Laurel, Maryland (and all educators who are interested in Web 2.0, animation, tech-tips, building a PLN, and other various professional development information) in a easy to use, graphically charged Steampunk format. Though we don’t really want other schools to edit and add to our wiki — we’re building it as a closed school community — our creations are Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, and Share Alike so any educator is free to copy and paste whole or multiple pages, as long as they follow the Creative Commons license. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? EMBEDDING widgets! I love me some widgets! From Gale/Cengage, World Book, SIRS, learning database widgets, Google doc forms, to Go!Animate and Xtranormal animations and videos, to the Sweet Search student resource box… embedding widgets on our pages brings them alive! 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Wikis are a daily source of communication and an invaluable tool to our program here at MHMS. We also have a MHMS Learning Wiki we use with kids & teachers for research projects, assignments, and community communication, and a MHTV wiki we use every day with our TV studio crew! 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" When a teacher contacted me last minute to add some links to a research wiki page she had just created for her kids going into the computer lab. Knowing that I had them on another page, I quickly copied and pasted the whole page of links for her page in one fell swoop. This took about 40 seconds. This was four or so years ago and the whole amazement of not having to insert "link > name link > save link," or have to write the "html <aref =" >" bit was just like, "WOW! So this is what the read-write-web is all about!!!" And really from then on I’ve evangelized how wonderful the world of Wikispaces is to teachers. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I’d say on first glance it’s animated, colorful, quirky, and fun… then upon further inspection it’s rich, extensive, informative, illustrative, and jam packed with information coolness and geeky goodness! Heh heh and humility, yeah… that, too!

Since it’s the last Monday of the month, we wanted to take a look at some of the cool Wikispaces-related things that people have been talking about this month. Here are some of the highlights from December: Wikis and the White House Early this month the White House Open Government Initiative created a wiki to get feedback from the public. We weren’t the only ones talking about it: The White House: Designing for Democracy craignewmark: "Hey, this is big, Feds asking for feedback for how citizens can interact with gov’t: http://go.usa.gov/1mT; Wiki - expertnet.wikispaces.com" ECASTnetwork: "White House is all ears. Ideas for government-wide software tool to elicit expert public participation? Weigh in: http://bit.ly/f048zZ" Twitter / @Wayne Moses Burke: "Interested in supporting #OpenGov initiatives inside government? Comment on http://expertnet.wikispaces.com/ - It’s cool!" @GSA New Media: "How can the gov elicit participation from experts on a given topic? Go to http://expertnet.wikispaces.com and give us your ideas." Resources for educators We know how much you like hearing about fun new resources, so we wanted to pass along a few of the ones we’ve heard about this month: Maryna Badenhorst: "Hello @theintelligiser, I see u r interested in digital portfolios: some resources http://echucaelearning.wikispaces.com/Digital+Portfolios" Joyce Seitzinger: "more #mypln videos here http://whatmyplnmeans.wikispaces.com/" Baiba: "Games in education: Virtual Worlds for kids to teens http://gamesined.wikispaces.com/Virtual+Worlds #games #elt" Chris McGee: "Some of the best blogging resources I have found is through http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/ #edchat" ‘Tis the season From winter games to New Year forecasting, some of you were showing off your seasonal wikis: Keisa Williams: "Holiday Fun Online Games for Elementary http://monarchcenters.wikispaces.com/WinterHolidayFun #iwb #games #edtech #christmas #tlchat" Kim D.: "Looks fun…and lots of ideas. http://winterwonderland.wikispaces.com/" Jason Chupick: "Introducing the 2011 Predictions Wiki: http://bit.ly/g8qWvV Wiki: http://bit.ly/i1gEhM Just hit edit and add faves." Cool wikis and cool projects And, as always, we wanted to highlight just a few of the fantastic things you are using wikis to accomplish: ulimasao: "http://newmarketmaungawhau.wikispaces.com/story2 The story of Mataaho retold by Newmarket children using SOLO Hot maps and Rubrics and Voki." alice ayel: "lunch box project: for students to use the second language they are learning for an authentic purpose http://lunchboxproject.wikispaces.com/" The Burlington Free Press, Burlington, Vermont — Hafter to help with South Burlington fiscal crisis Happy New Year, everyone!

On January 13 at 1 p.m. PST (9 p.m. UTC), we’ll be kicking off the new year with a Private Label webinar. Gene Roche and Mark Hofer from William and Mary will be joining us to demonstrate how they use Wikispaces Private Label in their university: e-portfolios, departmental intranets, class web sites, and more. It’s going to be a great opportunity to see some practical strategies and use cases for wikis in higher education — or any large organization. Don’t miss this chance to get answers and pointers from on-the-ground experts. Our webinars are free and fun. We’ll see you on January 13! Sign up today.

Like any part of your wiki, your Discussion tab is a flexible tool. It can be a vital communication hub, where you record critical conversations and make crucial decisions. Or it can be a casual meeting place, giving you a chance to share opinions and gossip with the other people using your wiki. If you want, it can even disappear altogether. How you use it is up to you. Understanding your options? That’s where we can help. Where is my Discussion tab? What does it do? What can I make it do? The Discussion tab lets you have a conversation, like on a message board. One person can start a topic or pose a question, then other people can add to that comment, or start new topics of their own. When your wiki is fresh out of the box, there is a separate Discussion tab for every page on your wiki. It’s a great option if you have different kinds of work happening on different pages, or if each page is built for a different group. But if your whole wiki is a single project for a single team, or if you want all the chatter as well as the work to happen on the pages themselves instead of in a separate section, it’s easy to change those settings: When you’re logged in as organizer of your wiki, go to Manage Wiki. Under Settings, click Wiki Info. Scroll down to Discussion Settings and make your choice: No discussion pages is pretty self-explanatory. One discussion page for the whole wiki removes your Discussion tabs and adds a Discussion link to your Actions menu, between New Page and Recent Changes. No matter where someone is in your wiki, clicking this link will take them to the same Discussion page. One discussion tab per page will put the tabs back on all your pages. Hit Save. What can I put in a discussion post? Words, pictures, and files. The words part is simple. To add pictures and files, you need wikitext. Say I’ve uploaded an image to my wiki, and it’s called happy.png. If I want to use it as an image, I would add it to my comment by typing, [[image:happy.png]] If I just wanted to link to the image, so that other users could download it, I would add it to my comment by typing, [[file:happy.png]] And that will work for any image or any file that you’ve uploaded to the wiki. In fact, any wikitext formatting will work in comments. You can find out more about wikitext here. Who can join the conversation? That depends on your permissions settings: When you’re logged in as organizer of your wiki, go to Manage Wiki. Under People, click Permissions. If your wiki is Public or Protected, only logged-in members of that wiki can post to a discussion — unless you check the "Allow message posts from non-members" box. In that case, any logged-in user will be able to contribute to the discussion, whether they’re a member of your wiki or not. If you have a Super-plan wiki or your wiki is on a Private Label site, you can adjust your Custom discussion settings. If your wiki is Private, only members of that wiki will even be able to see it, let alone edit pages or post discussions. Once you’re happy with your settings, click the Update button. I like where this is going, but how can I moderate discussions? As an organizer, you have two tools for moderating discussions: Notifications, and the Delete option. Depending on your notification settings, you can monitor all discussions for a whole wiki, all the discussions for a given page, or even just a single discussion topic. Our notification help will help you understand your options. If one of your members gets out of line, you can delete the inappropriate post, or a whole topic. And if someone makes a post in error, or wants to correct a mistake, you can delete the original post so that they can re-post their comment. Curveball time: We had a great discussion about this page last year. This year, I want to have a new discussion about the same page. Can I do that? Sure you can: Rename your page. Create a new page, and give it the name you liked for your original page. Copy everything on the original page into the new page. Now you’re ready to start over, with a fresh Discussion tab and a fresh History. That should be enough to get you started. If you have any questions, or if you want to show off how you’re using discussions in your wiki, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com.

On a chilly morning in December, I met with Marsha Pritchard, Jennifer Glanfield, Jessica Garvey, and Rachel Telzer via Skype. This team is responsible for the JourneyofaTshirt wiki, an online unit that they built to satisfy a pair of assignments from two classes at their Teacher Education Faculty in Hamilton, Ontario. Despite their busy end-of-term schedules, they were able to squeeze in a little time to discuss their wiki and share their views on the developing role of Web 2.0 in social media in education. This is a fragment of that interview. You can find the rest here. What were some of the other options you looked at, and what made you decide on a wiki? Marsha: When we were given the assignment of creating a Social Studies unit, there was no requirement to utilize Wikispaces for its final presentation; this was simply a paper assignment. However, as we began to work on the project, we needed a way to share ideas, and work on pulling the assignment together without meeting in person as we all lived a distance away from each other. We began by using Google Docs as a way to collaborate on the lesson plans, and even considered submitting our assignment in this form. However, we ran into problems of formatting, and decided that Google Docs was not the most professional and effective way to share our unit with other educators. With some encouragement, we decided to try out Wikispaces, and were immediately pleased with how user-friendly and professional it was. We had also considered using our personal blogs, however we found them restricting and they didn’t meet the "self-contained" layout that we desired. Jessica: We also looked at using our blogs to post our unit but found it wasn’t a great way to organize the information. That’s where Wikispaces stepped in. It allowed us to look professional and organize our work collaboratively. We also tried using our faculty’s learning network but found that was again an unideal environment to share the work. We wanted to reach more educators than only those in our faculty and within the first week of our unit being posted, we had other universities’ and your own recognition! Once you did get started, what obstacles did you run into? How did you overcome them? How did the finished product differ from your original plans? Marsha: Since our original project was just to be handed in on paper, the final product was vastly different than anything that we could have expected. With the tight deadline that we had to complete the project we had to work efficiently, and I think that this is what we can attribute the simple yet effective nature of our Wikispace to. Rachel: I think our biggest challenge was that it was new to all of us. I have to admit that when it was first suggested to put our final product on Wikispaces, I was a little apprehensive. I just thought we were creating more work for ourselves. However I quickly discovered that Wikispaces is very user-friendly and we were able to post our entire unit plan very quickly. We had originally planned to include an interactive ebook in our wiki, however we encountered some difficulties when trying to embed it. Jessica: We used a lot of trial and error and self-exploration in creating our Wikispace. For educators, this was something new we hadn’t been exposed to before, but as Rachel mentioned, we were really all quite pleased by the user-friendly nature of Wikispaces. It was easy to explore the options Wikispaces provided and it actually allowed us to enhance our unit in ways we never thought possible before. What did you learn from the project? Marsha: We learned so much for this experience beyond just how to create a unit of study. By jumping right in and being willing to try new things, we really discovered the value of technology in education and one’s own professional development. Now that we have each had experience with creating Wikispaces, we have been able to implement them in a practical way in the classroom and have experimented with its many uses. Jennifer: Ultimately, we learned a lot about student potential. Many times we are told to consider whether an assignment or learning task is at level for our students and whether or not they would be able to successfully complete it. We looked at a lot of social justice issues within our unit and spent a lot of time talking about how we could get students at a Grade 6 level to understand and connect with these issues (such as child labour, fair trade). It is important to always think that your students CAN do it, with the right support and resources provided by the teacher, nothing is out of reach for them! Jessica: Absolutely. We were able to cater "real-world" issues to our students. Using a backward design model and technology integration, we found we could truly engage and reach students at a more meaningful level. We have been taught that students need to be taught in ways such that they can recognize the capacity for their learning in the classroom to relate to learning outside of the class, and this unit has been designed to do just that. Hopefully, students will recognize their potential as advocates for greater social issues outside of the classroom as well — as the technology integration only engages our students and develops their skills as 21st century learners even more. Not having integrated vast amounts of technology before, we have realized its potential as educators through the power of collaboration and its use for professional development and its power for our students and their continued learning. Jennifer: And I think, once we started doing it, and seeing the ways that we could approach these topics through hands-on learning and child-friendly technology, that it isn’t too much for them, and you can never push your students too far. They are capable of it, if you use the right tools and resources to get them there. Rachel: And, just on a personal note from me, I’m probably the least tech-savvy of the group. And when it was brought up, I was like, "Oh no! More work!" But I quickly realized that it’s such a user-friendly way to get the information out there, and it wasn’t more work. It was quite easy. Jessica: It was fun, and exciting!

We are extraordinarily proud to share these award-winning educational wikis on Wikispaces. In different ways, each is an example of how wikis can be used to break down borders and build unique and captivating experiences that learners and educators will remember for years to come. Without further ado, the winner and second runner-up of the Edublogs Best Educational Wikis of 2010: Greetings from the World Recognized as the best educational wiki for the second year in a row, Arjana Blazic’s Greetings from the World wiki gives her students in Zagreb, Croatia a way to share their own experience and explore the world. Glogs posted by students from around the globe let us all see the world in the most special way possible: through the eyes of the people who live there. "I’m deeply honored and absolutely delighted to have received the award for the Best Educational Wiki for the second time in a row," says Arjana. "I launched the Greetings From The World wiki in September 2009 with 24 students from my class, because we wanted to create a virtual trip around the world and learn with and from our peers. When we won our first award in December 2009, there were 11 teachers from 10 schools in the project. Over the past year the wiki has grown into a truly international project with 21 teachers and 420 students from five continents. The cross-curricular approach and collaborative nature of the project definitely keep it going. We hope that more teachers and students join us in the future. Greetings From The World is a wiki open to teachers of all subjects, to students of all ages, to speakers of all languages and to learners from all over the world." Metasaga This year’s second runner up is Kate Coutts’ gorgeous wiki, Metasaga. Beginning with Uyeasound, Unst, in the Shetland Islands, each Metasaga gives students (and their teachers) a chance to learn by exploring their whole environment — not just physically, but historically and culturally, as well. Each individual Metasaga feels like a deeply personal guided tour, full of photographs, histories, and personal impressions. They are fascinating explorations of place that make you itch to go out and create your own. Two other Wikispaces wikis did very well in the voting: Celebr8UandMeDigitally gives Eva Büyüksimke?yan of Turkey and Alexandra Francisco of Portugal a space to celebrate special days and share different cultures with their EFL students. Wissahickon School District’s eToolBox from Ambler, PA is an alphabetical index of Web 2.0 tools, from Blogs to Wikispaces, with evaluations and recommendations for each one. Our heartfelt congratulations to all the winners and nominees. Way to go!