Several months ago, we locked our programmers away in a secret laboratory with a single, all-consuming directive: find a better way for wiki members to do independent classroom group work. We’re calling this new feature Projects. Whenever you have a particular assignment or activity, you can create a project for it, then define teams of members, each with its own unique pages, files, and permissions. Team content (that is, pages and files) are grouped together, separate from the main area of the wiki. That way, students in teams can do their group work completely independently from other teams. As of today, projects are available on all Education-plan wikis (both K-12 and higher education), Plus- and Super-plan wikis that are categorized as Education, and all education Private Label sites. Projects have been built specifically for classroom work, so we are rolling them out to our education customers only. If you’re curious about how Projects work, check out our project  help documentation — or keep reading. Wiki organizers If you’re an organizer of your wiki, it’s up to you to create and manage projects. As long as you’re logged in as wiki organizer, you’ll see the Projects icon in your action menu. Click on it to view, manage, and create projects on your wiki. Creating a project Go to Projects in the action menu. Give your project a Name. Like page names, project names must be unique. If you expect that you’ll be creating several similar projects, consider adding numbers to your project name. For example, the August biology unit might be biology-08. Decide how your teams will be defined. Set default team permissions for this project (you’ll be able to adjust individual team permissions later). Click Create. Assigning teams When you create your project, you have four choices about how to assign teams: Name the teams now and add members later Upload a spreadsheet with usernames and team names Randomly assign members to teams of a set size Use an existing project as a template No matter how you assign teams, you can always rearrange them later. You can even rearrange team memberships while the project is active, as many times as you want: Go to Projects in the action menu. Click on the name of the project with teams you want to rearrange. Drag members into the teams you want to reassign them to. As organizer, you and any other organizers on your wiki will be considered team leaders of all teams. You will not appear on the member list for any individual team, but you will have access to all teams and team pages. Managing permissions You have several options for team-level permission settings: Public to wiki: All wiki members can view and edit pages Protected to wiki: All wiki members can view pages, but only members of this team can edit pages Private: Only members of this team can view and edit pages Custom: Define custom permissions (on available to Super-plan wikis or wikis on Private Label sites) You can change these permissions at any time. Just go to Projects, click on the project name, then click on the permissions link for the team you want to change. Remember that custom team permissions overrule wiki permissions. For example, if your wiki is set to private, but your custom team settings include "Everyone can view pages," even people without membership to your private wiki will have access to pages on that team. Custom team permissions do not overrule Private Label site settings. Wiki members If you’re a member of a wiki, you’ll only see the Projects icon if you’ve been assigned as a member of a team on an active project. Once you have been assigned to a team, you’ll see a list of the teams you belong to, and can follow those links to the home page for that team. Adding pages When your team is brand new, there’s nothing in it but a home page. As you work, though, you’ll probably want to add more pages. To add a new page, just click the New Page icon in the action menu. This will create a new page on the team (not on the main area of the wiki), so it will be protected by the same permissions as the rest of the team. To see a list of the pages on your team, just go to Manage team > Pages. Adding files Your team also has a special set of files, separate from the files for the main area of the wiki. If you upload a file while editing a team page, it’ll be added to the files for that team. To see a list of the files in your team (and upload more files), just go to Manage team > Files. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with Projects. So be sure to send us an email at help@wikispaces.com, telling us what you think.

In 2009, Karen Hornberger, Rebecca Kelly, and Mary Schwander, three School Library Media Specialists in Bucks County, PA, started the PA Librarians wiki to share their incredible knowledge of digital resources with their peers. We asked Rebecca to tell us more about it: The field of library science is changing so rapidly. In order to stay relevant, we librarians realized that we needed to stay on the forefront of this change — adopting and forming it — in order to meet students’ needs in our schools. Two years ago, three Pennsylvania librarians decided to form a union where we shared the digital resources we were using in our libraries with others. Inspired to share our work (and learn from each other), we decided to use Wikispaces as the format to house our information. It is such a user-friendly resource that allowed us to work independently, but still house together, sharing information that we wished to showcase as part of our presentations. We’ve presented multiple times at the county, state and national level — sharing our wiki with many individuals. Since then, our resource has continued to grow (actually going international!) and we continue to encourage others to use and add to our resource at palibrarians.wikispaces.com. Wikispaces has given us the forum to share, and we have appreciated how your resource has allowed the three of us to grow professionally, while also affording us the ability to share our work with others. It has been a fantastic experience — one that will only grow as more educators take part in our work. Thank you Wikispaces for offering us such an incredible resource to teachers!

Shira Leibowitz started the No Office Day wiki in August of 2011. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: International No Office Day is a day — actually several days during the week of September 12 to accommodate different schedules — on which educational leaders will close our offices and spend the entire day with teachers and students in classes. It’s not the only day we’ll leave our offices. Indeed, resources being shared on our No Office Day wiki are energizing educational leaders to consider ways of spending many no office days and daily no office hours as well as stretching our thinking on ways of making time in classrooms more meaningful. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? As a newbie to the wiki world, my favorite feature is among the most simple — the ability to add pages with tables on which people from anywhere in the world can easily post resources. The No Office Day wiki has provided educational leaders with an easily accessible location to collect and save ideas being shared on twitter and in educators’ blogs. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? As Lower School Principal at Schechter Westchester, wikis and other web 2.0 tools have enabled me to collaborate creatively with our own faculty and educational leadership through wikis and Google Docs, our parents through our blog and web pages, and with educators throughout the world through Twitter, Nings, wikis, Linked-In and Facebook educational groups, and hangouts with educators on Google +. The ability to connect and share ideas far more readily both with individuals in our own school community and with educators throughout the world has immeasurably enriched my ability to serve students at Schechter Westchester. I am now enjoying introducing students to web 2.0 platforms such as Collaborize Classroom, Glogster, Twitter, and blogs. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" As momentum and excitement was building among educators on Twitter about No Office Day, I was learning immeasurably from colleagues’ tweets and blog posts. But, how could we promote No Office Day more broadly and collect the resources in one easily accessible place? My "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" moment came when a colleague suggested we start a No Office Day wiki. I recently had begun using a wiki to share resources at Schechter Westchester and another wiki to collect resources for an instructional coaches’ chat I co-moderate on twitter. "Of course," I thought. Our conversations, taking place on twitter and in blogs could be collected and saved on a wiki. While I had never organized a wiki before, I jumped in and learned by doing. I now have many more ideas about the possibilities for sharing on wikis. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I’m a life-long learner energized by the possibilities educational technology tools offer to better serve my students. While I’m neither a "techie" nor a "digital native," I am passionate about creative, collaborative learning both face to face and through web 2.0 platforms.

Last month we released Projects for all our education wikis. Our intention was to give you a better tool for group work, but, as many of you have pointed out, they’re also great for project-based learning. Project-based learning, or PBL, grew out of early 20th century education reform, like the works of John Dewey. It generally involves directed, open-ended questions, real-life problem solving, and presentation to an authentic audience. And, of course, it’s a great way for students to build collaboration and 21st-century skills while mastering content. We’re really looking forward to hearing how you use PBL and the Projects feature in your classrooms. We’re so excited, in fact, that we rounded up a few resources from around the web to help you out: The Buck Institute for Education is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to 21st-century learning skills, with a focus on PBL. Their site is full of useful resources, research, and teaching materials. The George Lucas Educational Foundations’ Edutopia site has videos and real-life examples around PBL. PBL-Online is an online laboratory for developing and sharing PBL resources and project ideas. This article from Scholastic discusses "The Power of Project-Based Learning." You can also find more PBL Web sites and lesson plans at LearningReviews. In The Child and the Curriculum, John Dewey observed that, "The logically formulated material of a science or branch of learning, of a study, is no substitute for the having of individual experiences." We can’t wait to hear what those experiences look like in your classrooms.

Do you love helping people? Do you have a knack for breaking things down to simple, easy-to-follow steps? Could you teach someone to cook a chicken over the phone, or give tap-dance pointers via email? And do you like working with amazing people in a super-fun, high-energy, start-up environment? If so, you might be the customer support person we’re looking for. Take a look!

You can do a lot with wikis. But before you get to the fancy stuff, you have to master the basics — and that goes for your students, as well. Now that the school year is underway, we put together a quick 15-20 minute activity, designed to get students comfortable with using wikis. All you need is this PDF handout, a wiki of your own, and a few minutes of preparation: Create your wiki and prepare accounts for your students. Prep media for your students: Upload an image to your wiki. Upload a file to your wiki. Find a video on your favorite video service (e.g., YouTube, TeacherTube). On the home page of your wiki, add a link to that video. Do not embed the video. The link should say, "Training camp video." Download the Training Camp worksheet and prep it for your class: In the field for task #1, enter the URL of your wiki. In the field for task #6, enter the name of the image file you uploaded. In the field for task #7, enter the name of the second file you uploaded. If you have any questions, or suggestions for similar materials that would make it easier for your students to use wikis, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com. If you are looking for a tool to present wikis to your peers, email us to request a copy of our PD Presenter wiki.

One of your most versatile tools for managing your wiki is on every single page — and a lot of people don’t even know it’s there! This month, I want to show off a handy-dandy little item called the Page Tab. Depending on your settings, you’ve probably got two or three tabs on each page: the History tab, the Discussion tab, and the Page tab. History, of course, lets you look back at old versions of the page, and we’ve discussed the Discussion tab before. But if you just think of the Page tab as the place you edit the page, you’re missing out. To find out what else you can do, move your cursor over that little gray arrow on the tab. You’ll get a dropdown list full of options: Details and tags gives you a box at the top of the page that tells you who last edited the page, how many revisions it’s had, and which tags have been added to that page. If you want, you can edit the tags right there on the page. Print does exactly what it says: Gives you a version of the wiki page that will print nicely. Just select Print to get a printable page, then print it out using your browser’s print command. Download PDF lets you save the wiki page as a formatted PDF. Backlinks gives you a list of all the other pages that link to this page — including pages in other wikis that also list you as a member. Source lets you see a wikitext version of the page. And if you’re an organizer of the wiki, you’ll also get these options: Delete, of course, lets you delete the page. (If you ever delete a page by accident, you can restore it within 30 days from your Recycle Bin.) Rename lets you change the name of your page. Redirect lets you send visitors to a different page automatically. Redirects can be really helpful if you’ve made a new page for something, but most people still have links to the old one. Permissions is a quick way to change the viewing and editing permissions on a single page. Lock will restrict editing of the page to organizers only. If the page has already been locked, you will see Unlock on this list instead. So get out there and take your Page tab for a spin!

Shawn Avery started the studentmathmovies wiki in March of 2011. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: Our wiki is a collaborative project aimed to share some of the amazing work happening in classrooms around the world. We focus on collecting math videos made by students that can be viewed and used as a teaching tool. We’ve sorted the wiki into different math strands so that it is easy to navigate to different math concepts. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? My favorite wiki feature is the ability to embed. It’s so quick and easy to add any number of different tools to a wiki. For this wiki, the ease in which we can add videos made Wikispaces the perfect place to host our site. We’ve also been able to easily add other great widgets as a Clustrmap and visitor feed. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We knew we couldn’t be the only class making videos as part of our math curriculum. We wanted to find other classes that were doing the same so that we could share math videos with one another. Using a wiki has made it easy for a group of different teachers to be able to add new videos at any time. We’re really hoping that through the use of this wiki, we’ll continue to grow until we’re able to host thousands of student made math videos. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" When trying to figure out how to best go about creating this site, we went back and forth between blogs and wikis. We thought that with a blog, we’d be able to feature a different video in each post. However, after partaking in Jonah Salsich’s Kites Around the World project, it became clear to me that the ease in which we were able to all add on to the wiki would make it the best choice for Student Math Movies. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I think I’d have many wikis talking to me all at once! I’ve found wikis to be such an easy way to create collaborative projects and now host quite a few of them. I think they’d all say that I’m dedicated to the field of education. Not only do I love teaching but I love the bond that educators share. We’re all always striving to be better and are always looking to share or learn new ideas. My wiki would say that it can tell there’s no other career I’d rather have!

Distance education, distributed learning, elearning, blended learning — whatever name it goes by, distance learning is on the rise all over the world. Technology has closed the gap for thousands of learners who, in the past, might have been bound by geographical location or physical limitation, or have simply had to prioritize other demands on their time. And it has given talented educators, no longer restricted to teaching a single face-to-face classroom at a time, an opportunity to reach a broader student base than ever before. It’s a thrilling time to be in the business of educational technology. Here’s a sampling of the research out there on the web: BellSouth report on the Costs and Funding of Virtual Schools U.S. National Center for Education Statistics numbers on distance learning at the postsecondary level and undergraduate enrollment in distance learning programs Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning, from the U.S. Department of Education United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) Research Center A More Connected Future: Outcomes of the Distance Education Review, New South Wales Department of Education and Training Canadian Institute of Distance Education Research (CIDER) Twitter feed of the Swiss Centre for Innovations in Learning (scil) (in German) Here are a few Wikispaces features that might help you set up or expand a distance learning program in your own school, district, or university: Projects Comments Widgets Wikispaces Private Label Site navigation Multiple authentication Guidelines around distance education vary by country, state, and/or province. Your local department of education should have information on distance learning.

Linda Yollis started the Educational-Blogging wiki in November of 2009. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I created the Educational Blogging Wiki in 2009 as a resource for teachers who are interested in having a classroom blog. The wiki includes class videos explaining the benefits of blogging, how to compose a quality comment, and the importance of the Creative Commons license. I chronicle the steps I’ve taken to teach my students how to compose quality comments and have tips to help teachers develop their own online communities. Included are links to other educational bloggers and sample posts organized by subject matter. I hope that teachers will find the wiki helpful and will open up their classrooms through educational blogging. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The widget button is a great feature. PowerPoints, calendars, videos, slide shows, maps, polls, and spreadsheets can easily be embedded in the wiki. Selecting a widget and pasting in the html code makes adding web 2.0 tools a snap! 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? I frequently get emails from teachers looking for advice about starting a classroom blog, teaching commenting skills, or making global connections. The wiki has proved to be a useful avenue for sharing information and learning from one another. The wiki’s navigation bar makes it easy for users to find the information they are looking for no matter what their level of blogging expertise. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" It is an exciting time in education. More and more teachers are looking to find meaningful ways to integrate technology in their classrooms. As I was formulating a presentation on educational blogging for my district, I realized how much important information there was to cover, and I only had one hour. Plus, the teachers who were attending my presentation ranged from total beginners to tech savvy pros. I thought to myself, "How can I deliver the full range of information and reach the needs of everyone?" That’s when I realized I could easily assemble all the aspects of education blogging in one space, a Wikispace! Teachers can sort through the wiki’s menu bar and access the information they need with just a click. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? My wiki would say, "Technology is wonderful! Together, we are able to share our knowledge and help one another… 24/7!"

Think about your wiki for a minute. What’s on it? Wiki pages, images, audio files. What else? Word docs, maybe? Spreadsheets? PDFs? Wouldn’t it be great to see all of that content — all of that stuff — at one time, in one place? We certainly think so, which is why we’ve introduced a new way to view your content and manage your wiki. Instead of digging through your Manage Wiki page, the options you need most often, Pages and Files and Members, are now located on the action menu, so you can get right to them any time you need them. Managing Pages and Files When you click on the Pages and Files link in the action menu, you’ll see a full list of everything on your wiki. The list shows you who was the last person to edit the page or upload the file, and the date of the last change. If you move your cursor over the name, you’ll get management options for that file: Image preview (image files only) File Size Type Rename Redirect (pages only) Tags You can also lock/unlock pages and files, manage tags, or delete assets in bulk by checking the items you want to change and using the buttons at the top right of the list. This new section also gives you options for filtering the list, so that it’s easier to manage the content you care about. If your wiki has active Projects, Filter by Project lets you limit your search to the pages and files within a single project, or to pages and files on the wiki home. Filter by Type lets you restrict your search to just pages, just files, or just page templates. Filter by Status describes how the page or file is being used in the wiki: "All" will give you a list of all the files that have been uploaded and all the pages or templates that have been created on your wiki. "Normal" will give you a list of all the files that have been added to a page, and all the existing pages that are linked to by other wiki pages. "Wanted" will give you a list of all the pages that have been created by new links, but have never been edited. (If your wiki includes links to files that have since been deleted, you will see those on this list, as well.) "Orphaned" will give you a list of all the files that have been uploaded to the wiki but never added to a page, and all the pages that have been created and edited, but no other pages link to them. Adding Pages and Files If you’re already on the Pages and Files page, you can click the buttons on the upper left to create a page or upload files. But no matter where you are in the wiki, you can click the plus-sign button in the action menu to add new content to your wiki: To create a new page, just type in the name and hit Create. If you have templates or want to add tags, you can apply them to the page before hitting the Create button. To create a new page template, select the New Template from the menu, and give your template a name. If you want, you can base the template on an existing page in your wiki. Click Create Template, edit the page as you want, and save the page as a page template. To add files, select Upload Files from the menu. Click the Upload Files button, select the files to upload, and click Open. And of course you can always add pages and files while you’re editing a page. Just link to a new page to create it, or use the files tool in the editor toolbar to upload files and add them directly to your page. Managing and Inviting Members Now you can get to your Manage Members page directly from the action menu. Just click Members and you’ll be able to see your list of members, review pending memberships, remove old members, and promote new organizers (or demote old organizers). If you want to invite new members to your wiki, click the invite Members button on the Members page, or just use the plus-sign button next to the Members action menu link from anywhere in your wiki. Either option will give you an invitation pop-up, where you can invite up to 100 members at a time by username or email address. If you’re creating new users with the bulk user creator tool, click the plus sign for the Invite Members popup, then follow the User Creator Tool link and create your users. And there you have it! These changes should make managing your wikis clearer and simpler than ever before.

Before the New Year, we announced a change to the Wikispaces interface. Today we released that change system-wide. In our popular Tatami theme, the changes will look like this (click on each thumbnail to see a larger version): Most of you don’t need to do anything to enjoy this updated and upgraded interface. But if you have a heavily modified custom theme, especially one that made changes to the tabs, you may find that it is no longer working the way you expect. If you run into any trouble, send us an email at help@wikispaces.com. Along with the interface upgrade, we’ve also released a new premade theme called Moderna. This theme was specially designed to make Wikispaces easier to use than ever. We hope you like it!

Today we released a little feature that should lift a big burden in uploading files: Now there’s a drag-and-drop option for adding files to wikis. Here’s how you use it: Go to your wiki. Click the + button next to Pages and Files in the action menu. Switch to the Upload Files view. Grab files from your desktop or file folders and drop them into the box. And that’s it! You’ll see a green check next to each file, indicating that the upload is complete. You can manage uploaded files from the Pages and Files link in the action menu. Of course, if you are more comfortable with uploading files by searching folders, you can still click the Add Files button and grab files the way you’re used to. The maximum size for an uploaded file (and total wiki storage) vary by plan. You can check how much storage is available on your wiki by going to Manage Wiki > Space Usage. Take a look at our pricing page to see the limits of different plans.

Earlier this month we released a new user interface for Wikispaces that transformed your tabs into page buttons. But never fear: all the familiar tools are still there, they just look a little different. Global Navigation These are the elements that stay at the top of the page, no matter where you go in Wikispaces. When you’re not actively using these controls, they will collapse so that nothing shows but your unread messages and your avatar. To expand the global navigation, just roll your mouse over it. When you’re not logged in, the global navigation will identify you as a guest. You’ll get a Join button that lets you request membership in the wiki you’re currently viewing, a Help button, and a Sign In button that will let you sign in or create a new user account. If you are logged in, the global navigation will start with a number that represents how many unread messages you have in your inbox. Click on this number to review unread messages or go to your inbox. Next you’ll see your avatar and account name. Click on this to go to your user dashboard. Click on My Wikis for a linked list of all the wikis you’re a member of. And, of course, you can always click for Help or to Sign Out. Page Buttons These redesigned buttons have all the same functionality of the older tabs. Of course you already know the Edit button. If your wiki has been set to one discussion area per page, the button immediately to the right of Edit is the Discussion button. It has a double white conversation bubble and shows the number of existing discussions posts. Just click on it to go to the discussion area, where you can read, review, and reply to posts. To the right of the Discussion button you’ll find a single yellow conversation bubble that shows the number of Comments on this page. Click on it to toggle the comment view on and off. Next to that is a button with a clock icon that shows the number of revisions to this page. When you click on this button, you’ll be taken to the Page History where you can review previous versions of the page, or revert to an older version. And, finally, you have the ellipsis (dot-dot-dot). This button gives you More Page Options. These are the options that used to be accessible by hovering your mouse over the down arrow on the page tab: Tags View as Print or PDF Rename Redirect Delete Lock/Unlock Permissions Notify RSS feed Backlinks Source (the wikitext for that page)

With the announcement of the 2011 Edublog Award winners, there are now two more award-winning wikis in the Wikispaces community. And we couldn’t be prouder! ICTmagic First place for the 2011 Best Educational Wiki went to Martin Burrett for his ICTmagic wiki. It’s a truly inspiring collection of IT resources for students and teachers, and it’s sure to give you more ideas than you could possibly have time to try. ICTmagic was also our Featured Wiki last August, so you can read more about it in Martin’s own words. Resources for History Teachers Second place went to Robert Maloy of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His Resources for History Teachers began as part of a class in 2006. Then, in the best tradition of all great wikis, it grew through the combined efforts of Professor Maloy’s students, along with K-12 educators and students from around the world, into a rich, multimedia, cross-referenced sourcebook for anyone interested in teaching or learning about history. We were also very excited to see that many of the people we have previously profiled on this blog were nominated for Edublog Awards, including Andrew Churches of the Educational Origami wiki, Gwyneth Jones of the Daring Librarian wiki, Shawn Avery of the Student Math Movies wiki, and Craig Kemp of the Ruma Tahi wiki. And congratulations to Linda Yollis, winner of the Most Influential Blog Post award, whose Educational Blogging wiki we featured in November. In fact, we want to extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the Edublog winners and nominees, across all the categories. The amazing educational content you are constantly creating and sharing all over the Web makes our work more satisfying, and inspires endless conversations around the office. Be sure to check out all the winners and nominees for yourself.

Though she’s new to wikis, Effie Kyrikakis’ bilingual Sunny Thought Project and Winners in Education wikis are generating a lot of buzz with their emphasis on positive thinking and global collaboration. We asked her to tell us about her experience: Have you had to learn something from scratch recently? Well, I have. Allow me to tell you my story. A need is born Our school has always been committed to teaching using the most up-to-date methodology and resources. So I was completely flabbergasted when I accidentally realised a few months ago that there are educators and schools around the world who are connected in different ways and actually collaborate and share resources and projects on a daily basis! Our school simply had to catch that train. But how? I had no idea whatsoever. It was obvious, though, that the ticket to this trip was a website in English where we would be able to present our school to the world and display our work and collaboration to our local students and their families — many of whom do not speak a word of English. Hard problem to solve… until I came across wikis and the idea was born to create a bilingual wiki. Challenges… Now, that was easier said than done. My greatest challenge was I had no idea how a wiki — or a blog for that matter — worked and, at the time, I would have gladly chosen to climb Mount Everest instead. (I wouldn’t suffer a mental burnout there at least…) However, our new-found Skype friends were waiting, so I finally got down to work. I found tutorials in YouTube, asked friends, slept very little for about a month and, Hurray, finally found my way around it. That wiki developed into our bilingual website, winnerseducation.wikispaces.com. It has become a huge success with our students and their parents and has been our link to the world. Although the wiki editor still drives me crazy at times, I think it is one of the best tools a school can use to present their work — for free! Unique features What makes wikis unique for me is their user-friendly design. Once you get to grasp the general idea, even a newbie like me can create a very presentable wiki, which has the added benefit of being interactive! Visitors can take part in the discussion or ask to be members. (Be careful who you approve though, as a hard day’s work can be destroyed in a jiff.) A little more digging and you can actually turn your wiki to a professional-looking website. No programming, just easy-to-use tools. Another very handy feature is members: All members are allowed to work independently, but still house together. Pages can easily be created and handled by a different member, while all members have access and can take part in the discussions. This is what inspired us to house in a wiki our new global project, What Makes Us Happy. More than ten schools from around the globe are already members and new ones are added by the day. Each of us can upload their students’ work at their own convenience. There are certainly more features to be explored that will make my life easier. Yesterday, for example, I discovered by chance that I can email all the members at once by one push of the button. Wow! I’m really thankful for this unique tool. Plus, this whole adventure has reminded me what it feels like to learn from the other side: that of the learner. This precious insight cannot but make teaching better, don’t you agree?

You’ve been working hard on your wiki. Over the past few months — or year, or years — you’ve been adding files, tweaking copy, embedding videos. And now it’s just about perfect. But, one day, your finger slips, and you delete your carefully crafted home page. Oh no! What can you do now? Well, not to worry. If you are the organizer of the wiki, you can restore any deleted pages or files from the Recycle Bin. Where can I find it? Just go to Manage Wiki and click on the Recycle Bin icon under Content. There you will see a list of all the pages and files that have been deleted in the past 30 days. And, if you are an organizer of that wiki, you can restore them to their rightful place. How does it work? Simply check the boxes for the pages or files you want back, and click the Restore button. If you’ve deleted a lot of things lately, you can narrow it down with the Search box, or Filter by Type (pages, files, or page templates). And if there are several versions of that page or file in the Recycle Bin, you can always look at the timestamp to see when it was deleted, so you know you’re restoring the right version. For example, let’s say I deleted my homepage yesterday, then tried to rebuild it this morning. But I couldn’t get it quite right so, after a frustrating half hour, I deleted the new homepage. Once I go to my recycle bin, there will be two pages called "Home." I just select the one with yesterday’s date, and click Restore. How do I permanently delete items in the Recycle Bin? You don’t have to do anything. Items in the Recycle Bin will be automatically deleted after 30 days. And items in the Recycle Bin are regarded as deleted, so they will not show up in search engine results. That being said, be aware that it sometimes takes Google and other search engines a couple of weeks to clear their cache. Once they have cleared their cache, though, the material should stop showing up in a Google search. And always remember to be responsible about items you add to a wiki — especially wikis that are visible to the public. You can learn more about your permission options here. Why can’t I see the Recycle Bin? Only wiki organizers have access to the Recycle Bin. If you can’t see it or can’t restore pages and files, you are either not logged in as organizer, or you do not have organizer privileges for that wiki. Make sure you are logged in and contact the wiki organizer to restore the page or file.

Tim McCollum helped start the eeabstudents wiki, part of the Expedition Earth and Beyond project, in September of 2010. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: Our design and writing team for Expedition Earth and Beyond (EEAB) was originally composed of four educators representing three states along with the project director from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. Since the members of the team lived in different parts of the country, most of our project development was conducted remotely via conference calls and email. As lessons and activities were written and evolved through multiple revisions, the need for a collaborative online workspace became apparent. We chose Wikispaces.com and the use of a wiki to meet that need. The project wiki became a highly useful website on which to store and review documents, images, PowerPoint presentations, and even video clips. When we eventually looked for an online tool for teams of students to participate in the project, a wiki was an obvious choice. We created a template that follows the process of scientific research; and we embed it into the new wiki that we create for each student team that chooses to participate in EEAB. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? One of the special features of Expedition Earth and Beyond is the opportunity for each team of students engaged in a research project to be assigned an online mentor. The mentor is typically a scientist at the Johnson Space Center — a real "rocket scientist." The mentor can follow the progress of the student team on the team wiki and communicate with the students through the discussion tool. This feature provides a wonderful opportunity for the exchange of ideas, questions, and advice between the students and their assigned mentor, and all communication is done in the public arena of the wiki discussion board. We have also created a teacher wiki for the purpose of sharing ideas and resources between different teachers who are guiding students through the EEAB project. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? The goal of Expedition Earth and Beyond is to engage students in grades 5 through 12 in the actual process of scientific research. The focus of their research is Earth System Science, and their main source of data comes from astronaut photography — images of Earth features captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other manned spacecraft. Thousands of these images are now archived and available online through the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Students working in teams use their own wikis as collaborative tools to conduct and share their research about specific Earth features. Their research often involves looking for visible changes to specific features by comparing astronaut images taken of the same locations over time. An added bonus of the project is the opportunity to request new images to be captured by astronauts aboard ISS to assist the students in their research. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" One memorable moment was when a class of eighth grade students was quietly engaged in their EEAB project work and the first message from their assigned NASA mentor arrived. A student suddenly yelled out, "We have a mentor, we have a mentor!" and the rest of the students immediately turned their attention to the wiki’s discussion board to read the mentor’s introduction. It was very rewarding to see and hear their excitement upon making the initial contact with their own mentor from NASA. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I think that our wiki would recognize that our design and development team has worked very hard at creating a rewarding experience, and that through the collaborative tool of a wiki, teachers and students can together experience the excitement of real scientific research.

Have you ever tried to change the permissions on a file, embed a widget, or copy a page? Have you ever tried to explain it to someone else? I know I have, both on this blog and over on our help wiki. And the truth is, sometimes it’s just much, much easier to show than it is to tell. Which is why we created our brand-new YouTube channel for all our video tours and instructional videos. Not only because it gives us a handy place to share tips and instructions that might be too confusing to describe in just words, but because it lets you, our users, share these videos with your members. Take a look! And if you find something you like, then go right ahead and embed it in your own wiki. Here’s a video to show you how it’s done: Get more videos at http://www.youtube.com/wikispacesvideos. Have a suggestion for a video you’d like to see or share? Leave a comment below and we’ll add it to the list.

Let’s say you’ve assigned your students a research project, and, when they’re done, they are supposed to post the paper to the wiki. They can link right to any of their online sources, of course. And any embedded videos or widgets will probably include a link back to their origin. But what about their offline resources? What about the books and newspapers and magazine articles? Today, I want to take a look at an old-school approach to citing sources: footnotes. How does it work? Edit your page. Place the cursor where you would like the citation to appear, usually at the end of a sentence or just after a quote or technical term. Click the Widget button in the editor toolbar. From the Wikispaces menu, select Reference. Click Embed Reference Marker. In the new box that has appeared at the bottom of your page, type the citation information. You can use the buttons in the toolbar to format the text. Scroll back up to continue editing the page. Save the page when you’re done. Once the page has been saved, you’ll see a small, numbered, superscript link in your body text to the citation you just added. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of your sources, with links to the portion of the text that cites them. When you edit the page again, just scroll to the bottom to make changes to the contents of your footnotes. Why are footnotes called "references"? "Footnotes," by definition, go at the bottom of a page. But the references on your wiki page can go anywhere you want to put them. For example, you might want to add a reflection area to the bottom of a research paper. If you were looking at the paper itself, it might be confusing to scroll past the reflection to check the sources. In the same way, it might be distracting to see a list of sources tacked on to the end of the reflection when they really belong to the paper above. In this example, you would want to place your reference section in between the paper itself and the reflections below: Edit your page. Place the cursor where you would like the list of references to appear, preferably on its own line. Click the Widget button in the editor toolbar. From the Wikispaces menu, select Reference. Click Embed Reference Text. You will see a tag on your wiki page that says "<references/>". Save the page. Now you’ll see your citations listed between two separate sections of content. How do I format citations? Well, that’s a tricky question. Different institutions recommend different standards for formatting citations. Ask your school or teacher if there is a standard format you should be following — they might have a prepared sheet or Web site that outlines the standards they prefer. Or you might look it up in a style guide. The MLA Style Manual, currently in its third edition, is very popular for academic writing. The Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association are two of the other most widely used style guides.

Last summer, we introduced Projects to make it easier to organize group projects on your wikis. This month, we’ve made Projects even more powerful by adding a scheduling component we’re calling Events. Events are an easy way to automate calendar-related actions: for example, you could set a due date that locks a Project, or send out automated announcements. Take a look: If you’ve been waiting for a feature like this, here’s how you can get started: Go to Projects in the action menu. Locate the Project you want to add an Event to, and click the number in the Events column. Click the New Event button. Enter your event information. Click Create. …and you can learn more on our new Events help page.

Tricia Fuglestad started the Fugleflicks wiki in November of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: The Fugleflicks wiki has been a place to make resources available for art teachers. It began as a way to post my conference presentation resources when I talked about making movies with students. Then when art teachers began asking where to find our Fugleflicks, Student-Created Art-Related movies, I put together a rough index on the wiki and referred them back there again. Then when teachers asked me how to create animation or green screen effects in movies I began a tutorial on the wiki to show them my tricks. I was able to add screencast tutorials, files they can download to practice with, and example movies. When teachers asked for advice on how to manage students for collaborative movie-making experiences, I added my advice on the wiki as well. Then when stories started coming in from teachers about how their students love to sing along with our Fugleflicks, I decided to encourage this with karaoke pages complete with audio tracks and lyrics. Then when I heard that you can embed a glog into a wiki (boy does that sound nerdy) I had to try too. See it here. During the summer I was asked to teach an animation workshop so the wiki grew again. This page includes everything I needed to help my students animate an original superhero story. I also have a (shhhh) secret in progress page for my students where I post the song lyrics, audio tracks, storyboards, or anything they may want access to at home to prepare for movie-making at school. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I love that I can embed video, audio, and attach files for others to download. I have been able to do so much with very little training with wikispaces.com to create a site that gives other art teachers access to my resources all in one location. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? My Favorite Wiki was designed for a collaborative art project: A Brush with Fame based on the travels of the award-winning brush actor, Young Sloppy Brush. He traveled to an art teacher’s classroom for one week to meet all the students and share his inspiring Fugleflick video and message about caring for paintbrushes. His wiki housed photos from his travels across the country, a google map that showed updates as he arrived in his next destination, his movie page with song lyrics and a karaoke version for singing along, a google schedule, a poster, and a history page to learn about why this brush was truly wonderful. Tragically YSB’s travels ended and he went missing mid school year. My students posted a video to help cope with the loss. We are still looking for information about his whereabouts. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" When I’m asked the same questions over and over again, the wikis give me a place to answer them and send the link. I have many wikis now and they are all about sharing resources for educators. I love that I don’t need to send an email with link after link of references, but one link to a well thought out page of references. Here are some examples: Ideas for integrating technology in art List of tech equipment for the art room Ideas for using an interactive whiteboard in art class A list of great iPad/iPod apps for art education (co-authored by Suzanne Tiedemann, Theresa Gillespie) 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? My many wikis: Fugleflicks, Fuglevision, Art is Interactive, Young Sloppy Brush, and iPads in Art, would all shout out in unison, "Please organize!" It’s true, I would have to agree with them. Wikis are very easy to start and add to. So I’ve let mine just grow and grow. So, it would be nice if things were tidied up a bit so the resources can be found quicker. But, for the most part, the wikis are happy to be up and running, they enjoy being of use, and complain very little. :)

Ryan Bowse here! I am the newest member of the Wikispaces team. With over 12 years in technology, and the last 4 years focused on helping schools better use technologies, I could not be more thrilled about joining the team. I am an East coast guy living with my wife and new son in this fantastic city by the Bay and enjoying all of what it has to offer. When trying not to blubber through parenthood, I am always looking for new fly fishing spots and the next family whitewater rafting trip. My focus here will be working with schools and districts to help them get the most out of Wikispaces. Looking forward to collaborating and engaging with you all!

Matthew Kalafat started the PWX wiki in October of 2011. You can read more about this wiki in the New York Times. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: We used the wiki to facilitate a cross-town "literature circle" in which kids discussed open ended questions for Of Mice and Men. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Discussions - follow up questions (is that a button?) 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We use the opinions of kids from another town of totally different demographics to help us understand characters of different demographics. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" When we went down to the computer lab as a class and we couldn’t wait to see what our "Plainfield friends" had responded. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Use me more — I’m awesome!