You could use a wiki all by yourself: You could use it to publish your work, or post your links, or keep your notes accessible and organized. You could run a solo wiki and it would still be a pretty valuable tool — but you wouldn’t be getting nearly as much out of it as the people who use it in groups. Because, as everyone knows, wikis are at their best when they are used for collaboration. And since Wikispaces is always working on better tools for educators, our wikis have lots of features to make classroom collaboration and group work better and easier. Organize group work with Projects Assigning group projects for your students is easy, but managing those assignments can be hard. It takes a lot of scheduling, and it can be tricky to make sure that everyone is doing their fair share of the work. Projects let you cordon off little sections of your wiki and hand them over to groups of students. And as a teacher, you can manage the permissions on those teams and check in regularly on content as it progresses, which is pretty neat. Encourage discussion Every page on your wiki can have its own dedicated discussion board. Depending on the type of assignment the group is working on, you can use it in any number of ways: Teachers can pose open-ended topics for discussion. Students can ask the teacher for help or clarification. You can even hold lively debates — and, however you use your discussions, every query and post stays with the work on the wiki. Give feedback and comments Our comments feature lets you scribble notes in the margins of a wiki page (figuratively speaking). This means different things to different people. For teachers, it’s a way to ask pointed questions about specific passages, to guide students in the right direction as they work, and to give more meaningful feedback during assessment. For students working together, it’s a way to communicate more efficiently throughout the project and to engage in peer review. Schedule Project-related Events If you have Projects on your wiki (and all education wikis will have Projects), you also have the ability to schedule Events. These let you schedule certain activities ahead of time, so you can lock or unlock projects for editing, send student reminders about dues dates, archive Projects, and more.

We love and appreciate teachers. Each of us has been a student and we all know how hard teachers work and the impact they can have on our lives. It’s officially National Teacher Appreciation Week. We try to thank every teacher every day by doing what we do. But we also thought that this week we’d share some of our personal stories about teachers that have made a difference in our lives. From us to you, thank you! Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau Ryan Bowse While it has been just over 20 years since I was their student I can say with the utmost confidence that I would not be where I am today if it were not for Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau. Both had a positive impact on my academic and personal growth in school. They made learning interesting, personal and enjoyable. Both were committed to my own discovery of learning. Their unwavering commitment to help me succeed is something that I am extremely grateful for in my adult life. These two teachers made a huge impact on my life and I hope they know their fantastic work has not gone unnoticed. Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau thank you. Thank you for being fantastic teachers and masters in your craft! Ms. Vander Naald Ryan Koopmans One day she said, "When you’re an adult this is what you’re going to remember learning in fifth grade." Our teacher then assembled our art projects, rough spheres of construction paper, and demonstrated the orbits of the planets: all in one plane, moving in the same direction, at different speeds, around the tremendously larger mass of the sun. You were right, Ms. Vander Naald, that is the one thing I remember distinctly. Of course you taught me much more, things that sunk in so deeply I would never stop to think where or how I learned them. Thank you for your inventiveness and your foresight. Professor Richard Ivry Max Dobrusin If I were put in charge of the task of "fusing" together the best qualities of a teacher and creating a "Frankenstein Instructor", Professor Ivry would be the prototype. Professor Ivry is, and will always be, a great inspiration in my life. He is as enthusiastic now as he was when he first started teaching…I assume - simply because I can’t imagine that a higher level of passion for a field of study exists. I strongly remember his ability to encourage participation by illustrating concepts head-on. How many students can say that their teacher used Transcranial Stimulation on himself to show its affects on the motor-cortex? Strangely, I am also reminded of Professor Ivry’s hard (but fair!) tests, which were meticulously constructed to include ALL of the material covered, and which required a student to not only memorize facts - but to also be able to think critically and apply learned concepts. Professor Ivry, thank you for being a great instructor and for instilling in me a thirst for knowledge! Mr. Plitt Wendy Gorton I loved writing long-winded romance/detective stories in middle-school, full of cliches and run-on sentences and thought maybe I’d be the next great American novelist. Mr. Plitt’s creative writing class was workshoppy and full of collaboration, and he was the kind of educator that would take a folder of 70 pages and actually read them all on the weekend and give me detailed notes as though I were a New York Times Bestselling author. And you know what? He totally made me feel like one. Go Mr. Plitt and go all awesome teachers! Ms. Sok Eric Ablett Ms. Sok, was one of my history teachers back in high school and the first teacher I truly considered a friend. She specialized in humanizing historical figures and movements, placing an importance on what lessons we took away from the classroom as well as how we used that knowledge to better ourselves and our environment. It was an empowering moment when I realized that, one day, a chapter about the time we were living in would become a history lesson for future generations. To an undeterred optimist with an outlook on life and learning that I continually aspire to have myself, thank you Ms. Sok! David Jeff Hanke I went to one of those middle schools where you call teachers by their first names. All the teachers were awesome, but David in particular stood out for me. He was the Math and PE teacher, in addition to being the Ultimate Frisbee coach. I’d always been interested in math, and David turned that interest into understanding. He was also responsible for my life-long (so far) love of Ultimate Frisbee. I don’t play as often as I used to, but I try to get in at least a couple of pick-up games every month. Thanks for everything, David! Mr. Baron, Mrs. Harley, Ms. Reetz James Byers I was lucky to have many inspirational teachers. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade triumvirate of Mr. Baron, Mrs. Harley, and Ms. Reetz were particularly memorable. Mr. Baron taught us how to play chess, and in the process how to think about winning and losing in real life. Mrs. Harley opened our eyes to the world around us with a wonderful sense of humor. Ms. Reetz demanded and got our very best, leaving every one of us with our standards raised. I’m thankful to them and to all teachers who dedicate their lives to their students. Mr. Schwartz Adam Frey There were only two of us who wanted to study computer science at my high school. But Mr. Schwartz taught the class with passion nonetheless. He took time to understand what we were looking for and helped us navigate a broad subject to get us where we wanted to go. On reflection, that was as much about learning about ourselves as it was learning about the fetch execute cycle. We both went on to degrees in computer science which heavily informed our career and lives. Thank you Mr. Schwartz. And thank you to every teacher I ever had who helped me become the person I am. Thank a teacher today.

With summer approaching soon, we here at Wikispaces want to help our educational community think about what projects and tools they would like to deploy in their classrooms for the next school year. We will be hosting a free Wikispaces for Education Boot Camp for all interested parties on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 1:00pm PDT / 8:00pm UTC. When is this in my time zone? During this webinar, we will be introducing you to wikis, highlighting a few key features exclusive to our free for education wikis (including Projects!) and spend some time answering your questions. You can sign up for the free webinar here: June 21st Education Boot Camp Webinar If you have any suggestions for topics you would like us to cover or questions you would like to send us in advance, you are welcome to do so at help@wikispaces.com

Today we are making some changes to prevent Wikispaces from being used by spammers. In short, users who are not "verified" will not be allowed to make wikis publicly viewable. We are making it as simple as possible for users to be verified, so this won’t impact most legitimate users, but we are taking a hard line against spam. Spam is an insidious problem. Spammers take advantage of services like wikis and web hosts to scam people. And they do so at massive scale. Wiki spam is a particular form of spam where wiki hosts are abused by spammers posting huge numbers of spam pages. These pages can be used to drive people to dangerous websites and entire economies have built up of scam artists convincing people that wiki spam is a way to get rich quick. We have been fighting the spammers who have been taking advantage of Wikispaces for years and we have decided that we cannot in good conscience allow Wikispaces to continue to be used for these purposes. Fortunately there is a relatively straightforward solution. We will no longer allow content to be publicly viewable on Wikispaces unless the user making the content public is "verified." Verifying Accounts So what does this mean for you? If you are a Wikispaces Private Label customer, you won’t see any difference. These changes only affects wikis on Wikispaces.com. If you don’t want or need any of your wikis to be publicly viewable, then you don’t need your account to be verified. If you already have a publicly viewable wiki, or you plan to make one in the future, you may already be verified. Visit your publicly viewable wiki. If you do not see a warning at the top of the page your account is already verified. If your account is not verified and you would like to have publicly viewable wikis, you’ll see a prompt when you try to make a wiki Public asking you to verify your account. This will require you to pay $1. The $1 is one-time only and covers your user account and all the wikis you create. It’s the easiest and most effective way for us to identify you as not being a spammer. If you have any questions or concerns about that you can always contact us. Existing Wikis Right now, all publicly viewable wikis that were created by accounts that are not verified will display a banner to the organizers indicating that the creator’s account needs to be verified. At some point in the near future we will switch all of those wikis over to be Private. Plan Changes Basic Plan Our Basic Plan now allows a wiki to be Private. But a Private Basic wiki can only have a maximum of 5 members or organizers. This does not affect education users, since they can upgrade to Plus for free. Other users who want a private wiki have a choice between a private Basic wiki with up to 5 members, or paying for a Plus wiki for $50 per year. And remember, to make a Basic wiki publicly viewable, your account needs to be verified. Plus Plan Our Plus Plan allows a wiki to be publicly viewable or private and has no limitations on the number of members it can have. We give away our Plus service for free for any wiki used exclusively for education, K-12 or Higher Ed. Non-education users can pay $50 a year for a Plus wiki. Our pricing page is a good place to get an overview of these changes and our plans. Doing all of this will stop spammers from using Wikispaces to hurt people. And that’s something we take very seriously. We appreciate your support as we make this change. As always let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Joanne Thomas started the ah-bon-french wiki in November of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: This wiki is a full year curriculum of my 6th grade French textbook. It has notes, videos, audio, images, student projects and web 2.0 practice, as well as lesson plan bullets for teachers and parents with video footage of the activities. I created it as an online textbook for my students and was happily surprised that people from at least 216 countries have used it. It has been visited enough times over the years to be recognized by the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) as one of the top 5 searches for "Middle School French", "Middle School French Textbook", "Madame Thomas" and "Ah bon". I never used any SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques! In 2009 "Teacher’s Discovery" French discovered my web presence and contacted me to publish the information in the wiki as a textbook. The teacher’s guide and textbook came out in 2011. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I like the "table" feature because I can neatly organize my chapters and units and users can find things immediately. A close second is the "Oops, what have I done?!" retrieval feature that the wiki offers in case a student erases a page or I mess up a page! 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? I had the students make e-pal videos and add other "fun facts" info for their pen-pal friends in France. They made a French video for their practice and then an English video for their pen pals’ practice. They had a great time with it. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" It is so nice to have all the info in one spot for student and parent access. I had a student who was in the hospital for a few weeks and the parents and I thought, "How is she going to catch up?". Then, "AHA! She can use the wiki!". I contacted the parents and the hospital tutor and they were thrilled she could still work at the hospital. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? It would say, "Que vous êtes venue de loin, bébé" (You’ve come a long way, baby). I have had the best teaching years with this wiki and have been able to share the info with countless students and teachers around the world. Oh, and it would say, "You’re welcome that a publisher discovered me and you’re officially an author"! The Spanish version of my textbook will be out in the spring of 2013. I love you Wikispaces!!!!!! Here are my other wikis: 7th grade French Middle School Spanish Foreign Language Conference (my methodology) Web 2.0 Tutorials Wikispaces Tutorials I heart Quizlet tutorials (an educational Web 2.0) German educational site for teachers Sample of custom wiki for student whom I tutor

We love our user success stories. Lucky for us, there are plenty of them to go around! We hear them at our webinars, on Twitter, on the phone, in our email, and even in-person at events like the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. Our team was on the ground in San Diego, and Wikispaces co-founder Adam Frey presented, along with educators extraordinaire Vicki Davis and Ben Curran, "The Wonderful Wide World of Wikis" to a full house of eager educators. We asked a few folks we chatted with over the past month if they wouldn’t mind showcasing their Wikispaces sites to help spark educational brainstorming for all of you as the summer blazes forward. We’ll be sharing a few every week throughout the summer. For now, sit back in your hammock and enjoy! Common Core Standards at Guilford County Public Schools We know that educators are faced with quite a few initiatives every fall, and the latest Common Core Standards are on many teacher and administrator lists for September. We were thrilled to see Crystal Bailey of Guilford County Public Schools work on this gem of a standards site: http://gcscommoncore.wikispaces.com/ As you click through each of the well-organized buttons (which are always fun for creating navigation on your sites!) you can see the integrated Unit Plans that they have developed. Race to the Top at Western Suffolk Western Suffolk BOCES, one of our Private Label customers in Dix, New York, has created a separate wiki for their Race to the Top Workshop on the Common Core. A cool feature they’ve taken advantage of is our custom domain option. They have their new wikis under their own domain, making it super-easy for them to organize multiple wikis for their schools and district. Check out their resource wiki here: http://rttt.westernsuffolkboces.wikispaces.net/Common+Core+ELA ETS and the Common Core Educational Testing Service, ETS, uses their Wikispaces site for a research initiative with the Common Core Standards at http://www.cbalwiki.ets.org. This site aims to "offer new insights into how best to design assessment, instruction and professional development so that they have maximum positive impact," according to Paul Deane, Principal Research Scientist, ETS Research and Development Division. We love how it’s organized and can definitely see how it can be a resource for schools and administrators planning to use wikis to house their standards initiatives in the coming year. There are heaps of great resources out there, so do continue to share your ideas and best practices with us for your standards-based initiatives! Feel free to share in the comments below, by tweeting us @wikispaces, emailing us at help@wikispaces.com, and joining in one of our upcoming webinars.

Update: Miss the webinar? Watch it now at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enmhrEkRWuc. Think you know all there is to know about Wikispaces? Do you want to impress your students and fellow educators this year by showing off some new wiki skills? Join us next week for our Advanced Tips and Tricks Webinar on Tuesday, August 7 at 11:00 am PDT. During this free, one-hour presentation, we will be delving deeper into our widget offerings, notifications, page templates, bulk operations, as well as highlighting a few real world use cases. This webinar is not recommended for first time users, but don’t worry, we’re holding a webinar for you wiki rookies very soon. Keep an eye on our blog for more. Register for the Advanced Tips and Tricks webinar today.

Update: weren’t able to join us live for this webinar? We’ve put a recording online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Pdaqqi9gk. Enjoy! During our most recent expert panel we saw that there are some serious benefits to blended learning and flipped classroom practices. Now, our team would like to show you how to successfully implement these learning techniques with Wikispaces and our Private Label service. Join us tomorrow, Thursday, September 6 at 1:00pm PDT, for our free Virtual Learning Environment Webinar. During the hour-long session, we will present practical solutions for building an online, collaborative platform for all your digital portfolios, flipped classrooms, curriculum design, and professional development. Join us for the event or receive a recording to review later. Register now.

Brett Young started the mryoungspace wiki in November of 2008. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: My classroom wikispace has been completely embedded into my teaching practice. By using my classroom wiki, I have virtually made my classroom paperless. My students create their own wikispace, at the beginning of each semester, and link their wikispace with mine on a page that we create that stems from our classroom wiki. All students have access to each other’s wikis to allow for a more "community" approach in our learning and sharing with each other. All classroom materials, outlines for daily activities, Student Learning Objectives, are accessed through our classroom wiki. My main approach to this is to allow students to have complete access to our classroom, at any time, no matter where they are in the world. Students can be on vacation, traveling with sports teams, or away due to illness, and they can still participate in our classroom just by going to the classroom wikispace. Students never have an excuse for not knowing what is going on in the classroom as the wiki can be accessed on any computer or device including the iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, and other mobile devices. Our wiki is also great for keeping parents updated on what is going on within our classroom. At any time, a parent can go to the wikispace and pretty much see every element of what is being taught, the materials being distributed, and upcoming dates for certain classroom and school activities. I have also had other teachers use the wiki to collect resources for their classrooms and have a "guide" to follow with the class outlines and our daily activities. My policy with those resources is "Take it! Change it to fit your class needs! Let me know how it works for you! I don’t need any credit! Why reinvent the wheel when the resource is already there for you?" 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I have two! The first one would be the embed feature for YouTube videos. Instead of going back and forth to YouTube for certain materials I can just embed the video right into the wikispace. It has allowed me to accumulate a collection of videos and material that are always at my disposal at any time, in any place! The second one would be the ability to upload documents and resources for the students to download. Never again do I have to hear "I lost this piece of paper! It is ripped! I wasn’t here for it when you handed it out!" All of my students know to go, check the wiki, and download the handouts they need. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Wikis and other web 2.0 tools allow teachers to give students a lot more freedom in discovering and creating more meaningful learning. Students today, are already using these tools in their everyday lives. I see it as my job to keep up with what they are using and help them discover how to harness and use it to demonstrate their learning in all of their classes. The wikis have allowed my students to engage in meaningful learning as it gives THEM, not me, control of their learning. Some people might think that this is just going online, copying and pasting stuff onto a page, and hitting save. That is definitely not the case! Our wikis have allowed the students the freedom to share their thoughts through writing, upload videos that they have taken with their cameras and phones, share pictures they have taken and edited using web 2.0 tools, and have a collection of links to resources they find useful in their research for other classes. Plus these tools allow all student needs to be met. I might have a student who struggles with writing but can talk about their learning. So instead of them having to share through text, we can upload a video of them talking about a certain topic. Some students may feel uncomfortable speaking out in class, so they decide to share their thoughts on their wikispace through text. The cool thing is that all of this is being done in their own space. The best part is that wikis are a global tool! They are not hidden in a notebook or just handed in on paper where only one person can view at time. Wikis and web 2.0 tools have allowed our learning to go global! The walls of the physical classroom have come crashing down and we allow ourselves to share with everyone! 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" There was a moment about two years ago, when I had a student come up to me after she had completed one of my Media Studies classes and had graduated from high school. It was the first time I had seen her since graduation and she specifically had to tell me that she missed having a classroom wiki to go to in her university classes. She missed having things just "being there" for her to access on a needs basis. Plus she also missed the idea of being able to view what other students were working on and the sharing of ideas within our "wiki community". However, she did tell me that she was using a wikispace for one of her classes in order to put some assignments together and for group collaboration for a project. When she presented it to the professor, he was very impressed and asked to know more about what these "wikispace things" were. Right there, it showed me that, even outside of my class, my students were using the tools they had discovered to take their learning to the next level. They were finding ways in their personal lives to use a tool, such as a wikispace, to make it work for them! Even today, I have students going to teachers and asking them to look at their assignments and learning on their personal wikispace and teachers are coming to me and saying "Hey! This is a great way to have everything in one place!" My reaction is always "Yep! They work really well! You should try one!" 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Oh wow! My first reaction to this question was that it would say "Good thing you are a teacher and I get summers off too because we sure spend a lot of time together!" Ha Ha Ha! This is true because all of my classes stem from my classroom wiki and we do spend a lot of time together! I guess my wiki would say that over the last four years we have done our best to open some doors in student learning and accountability. Between myself and my wiki (yes, us together) we have made it virtually impossible for students, parents, administrators, other teachers, and the rest of society to not know what is going on within our classroom. Some teachers may look at it as "extra work" but once you get into it, and learn the basics of what to do, the doors will open up and you won’t teach your class the same way again. I always think of my wikispace as my "Teacher’s Day Book", except it is not sitting on a desk, it is open for the world to see. There is no hiding in our classroom. We have our student learning objectives posted, we know what we are trying to learn, we have daily activities posted, the resources from text, images, and video are endless, and everyone has their own wikispace to showcase their learning in many different, unique, and creative ways! I guess I would say that our class wiki has taught me that the days of having things "handed in" just for the teacher to view are over! Now, there is no excuse for not sharing our learning on a more community and global scale. Because of that reason, I am truly excited about the future of education!

Wikispaces now works even better with iPads! With our latest release for mobile devices, you’ll find a sleeker interface, seamless navigation, and the same rich wiki functionality you’ve come to expect from Wikispaces. A few things to note as you get started: The tools for working on your page - Edit, Discussions, Comments, History and Other Page Options - are right there at the top of the screen. Head to Other Page Options to tag, rename, delete, or otherwise manage your page. Your sidebar now lives at the bottom of your screen. There you can find Wiki Home, Recent Changes, Pages and Files, Members, and Other Wiki Options. Looking for your wiki navigation or Manage Wiki? Head to the Other Wiki Options button at the bottom right of the screen to find your full sidebar. (Psst. It looks like an ellipsis "…") So go ahead, grab your iPad, and head to your wiki! We think you’ll love the changes. Stay tuned to see how educators are using Wikispaces and iPads in their classrooms. Rolling out iPads across your school or district? Wikispaces Private Label offers an easy way to bring collaboration to your classrooms while managing all your accounts and activity. Contact us today to learn more. Update: With iOS 6, you can now upload photos and videos directly from your iPad! Let us know what you think.

Join us for our Digital Citizenship Panel on Tuesday, Sep. 25th at 11am PDT Our team has the pleasure of working with some pretty amazing educators from around the globe, and we’re always amazed at how they’re handling some of today’s most innovative initiatives and biggest challenges in education. Last month, we had our first panel on school solutions for blended learning where we saw ways to bridge face-to-face learning with online pedagogy. Each panelist shared how they plan, execute and evaluate a blended learning and flipped classroom environment and we took questions online. This Month This month, we’ll be exploring the topic of Digital Citizenship and Wikispaces. Three Digital Citizenship advocates will share their thoughts, experiences, and best practices in this live online panel. This is a fantastic opportunity to hear how to begin, rejuvenate, or tweak your commitment to help students discover what Digital Citizenship means in today’s world. Our Panelists Kelly Mendoza Common Sense Media @kellymendoza Jeff Brain Reed Union School District Tiburon, CA @misterbrain Gail Desler Oak Grove Unified School District San Francisco, CA @GailDesler Want to join? 1. Sign up and we will send you information before and after the event. 2. Come to our event page at 11am PDT on Tuesday, Sep. 25th where the live event will be streaming. With a Google+ account, you can easily type questions into the comment box and we’ll answer them live from Google+. Alternatively, you can ask questions via the hashtag #panel2012. 3. Can’t make it? No problem. It will be archived on our YouTube Channel directly after the event.

With our latest release, we have introduced the concept of wiki types, and our first new wiki type is the Editable Website. All of the Wikispaces you know and love are what we are now calling Basic Wikis. They emphasize collaboration and discussion around the content you and your users work on together. But sometimes you just want to put a website up for others to view. You want the easy editing of Wikispaces but you don’t want people visiting your wiki to see all of the editing and discussion functions. For those times, our new Editable Website type is perfect. When you create an Editable Website wiki, we hide the editing and management tools - like Edit and Manage Wiki - from your members and visitors. Organizers are still able to edit the wiki like normal, but others will only see a website. Getting started When you create a new wiki you’ll be given the option to choose a wiki type. If you already have a wiki and you want to change its type, head to Manage Wiki and then Wiki Info. When you create a wiki in editable website mode, your wiki permissions will be set to protected, and comments and discussions will be disabled. As an organizer you’ll see a rectangular icon in your black global navigation bar at the top of the screen. Click on it to reveal your edit button, page options, and action menu in the sidebar. Click it again to hide these options. Try it out Here are some ideas for how to use our new Editable Website wiki type: Create your own website. If you’re looking to share resources, videos, and links with your students or other visitors, it’s now easier than ever. Collaborate then publish. Start a collaborative writing project that you build with your students as a Basic Wiki. Then, when it’s ready, switch over to an Editable Website and share it with parents. Create public-facing content on top of your private workspaces. Our Private Label service lets you create as many wikis as you’d like to on your own site. By choosing between our new wiki types, you can decide how people interact with the content you build. Use Editable Website wikis to share news and information with your parents, community, or customers. Or set up Basic Wikis to encourage collaboration in your classrooms or departments. More options, more flexibility. How are you using our new Editable Website wikis? Let us know in the comments below. And be sure to keep an eye on the blog to learn about upcoming wiki types and features.

"It’s easier to type." "Fun to touch." "Easy to find pages." This is what the students in Amy McCauley’s room at Pinehill Elementary in Auckland, New Zealand said as they worked on their class wikis from their iPads. Amy’s doing a pretty extensive iPad roll-out this year and we were able to watch the progress unfold over Twitter. Students in particular really enjoyed the ability to use Wikispaces on their iPads "anywhere because the iPads are small and portable." We asked Amy to share a bit about her overall use of Wikispaces and how her students have fared with the new mobile experience. We hope it’s helpful to you as you roll out mobile devices in your own learning space. How I use Wikispaces Planning. I have all my planning (overviews, units and lessons) on a private wiki that my team all has access to. This is a great way for me to have all my planning online and easily accessible. I used to have all my elearning links in hundreds of different places (emails, bookmarks, written down!) and now I can link and have them all in one place! (Note: Amy’s school also has a great eLearning Resource wiki that you can check out!) Class Wiki We have our class wiki, which is really the central hub for all lesson plans, help, and supporting materials for their lessons. I post as much as possible so students can go and have a look when they need to. For example, if we have been discussing something in class, they can have another look at a related slideshow or website. I manage the space and my students add content in some places, all using their iPads. Student Wikis Students have their own Wikispace which I like to call their ebook. They have control over their own space. I run individual learning programs and within their weekly program they have allocated time to ‘publish’, which involves putting up content on their Wikispace. I also check these spaces and add comments as well as make notes. For example, this week as I have focused on their blogs and writing, I have notes to catch-up with various students and have left comments for them to make changes or move forward using the comment function. Within their wikis, the students have each set up a blog page. As we don’t have email addresses for the students, I couldn’t find a blog site for the students that met all our needs. I got the students to set up a page called ‘blog’. Students are expected to blog at least once a week, reflecting on their learning. I have just put an RSS feed (thanks to the advanced webinar last month!) of each of their blogs on our class wiki. I have 6 featured blogs at the top! Thanks Amy! We look forward to hearing more from you as you and your students bring iPads to the world of wikis. Be sure to follow Room 14′s journey on Twitter.

We’ve heard from many of you that you’re always looking for more training and professional development resources. We’re excited to share with you some fantastic examples of how educators are using wikis to bring together their professional development resources. We hope they spark your creativity. iPads and Professional Development at Buhler USD 313 Rosemary Miller, District Integration Technology Specialist from Buhler Unified School District 313 in Buhler, Kansas, uses wikis regularly to organize all of her professional development resources. One of Buhler’s wikis at http://buhleripads.wikispaces.com/ is a great example of this. You can find information on different apps for the iPad as well as how they’re being used in the classroom. Be sure to check out how they snazzed up their wiki with a custom Wikispaces theme and embedded graphics. Empowering Teachers to Empower Students Helen Gooch, Instructional Technology Coordinator at Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools in Clarksville, Tenneesee, uses Wikispaces to "house all the technology we do here in the district as an exemplar of what is possible and a test bed for assisting teachers with their implementation." Check out just one of their rich professional development wikis at http://empowerstudents.wikispaces.com/. Organize Workshops and Conferences By sharing your PD resources and events on a wiki, your educators can easily reference, share, and engage with them. Melissa Shields from Etowah County Schools hosts her workshops on her wiki. Her teachers visit the site to find PowerPoints, exercises, checklists, and even how-to videos from her workshops. Manitou Springs School District uses a wiki for their Summer Learning Institute. There, attendees can find resources and activities for each event, work on them at their own pace, and return to them as needed throughout the year. Adrienne Michetti from the Australia International School of Singapore posts her workshop resources in one place as well. We’ve highlighted a few ways people are using wikis to support their professional development, but we’d love to hear more. Let us know in the comments below. How do you PD?

Ron Mader started the Oaxaca wiki in July of 2007. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: The Oaxaca Wiki brings together the fans of Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s plurilingual in approach and we measure progress slow step by slow step. We bring together the visitors and the locals who edit information about unique cultural and environmental aspects of Oaxaca in multiple languages (starting with English and Spanish). We focus attention on niche interests in travel and tourism, helping guide the way for those interested in cuisine, indigenous peoples, cycling, markets, and a host of other topics. All travel is local when we learn to listen to the locals. The wiki format has worked wonders. Paraphrasing Benjamin Disraeli: "The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to wiki about it." 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? History. The ability to see and review revisions over time makes the progress visible to all. Cheers to embedded transparency and accountability! Second favorite: Embed a widget. This has been so helpful in adding videos. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Creating events, including local workshops, photo safaris and grassroots fairs. To get people to interact requires collaborative editing. The wiki has been a stellar platform. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" The development of the Indigenous Cuisine (Comida Indigena) menu. I simply print out the page from time to time and show it to friends at local markets. The conversations that this engenders is awesome. Likewise, we couldn’t create multiple language vocabularies without true collaboration. Check out: Santa Maria Ocotepec (Ayuuk/Mixe) Teotitlán del Valle (Zapotec) San Pedro Tidaa (Mixtec) 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I think the wiki would exclaim how collaboration is the key strength of my work. Even if the pages are not physically edited by others, they show the steady development in a slow conversation and reveal how valuable local knowledge is when combined with global partners. This type of open journalism encourages feedback that was unimaginable ten years ago. That said, what we do in the next ten years depends on our willingness to collaborate. The experiences online and in face to face chats using this wiki has been fundamental in developing collaborative skills among friends who share different backgrounds, languages and interests.

There’s a lot of noise today about entrepreneurs and investors getting involved in education technology, much more than we’ve ever heard. This is a good thing. But we’re also convinced that most of today’s new ed-tech startups will fail and that a lot of investor money will be lost when they do. In part, that’s just how it goes in entrepreneurial endeavors. Creative destruction involves destruction of entrenched players and interests but also of many new entrants as we try to make change. Given the stakes however, we wanted to publish a guide for ed-tech entrepreneurs and investors based on our experiences over the last 7 years in building and growing a successful, large ed-tech platform. In particular, we wanted to put down in writing what it means to us to succeed in this market and how to pursue that kind of success. We’ve gotten so much out of building Wikispaces, and we hope that many more entrepreneurs have the kind of experience we’ve had. In particular the ongoing conversations we’ve had with all the teachers who have been part of our journey have been both the mechanism behind, and a crucial part of, all of our success. We welcome your feedback and comment. Read the full guide then come back here to discuss.

For those of you familiar with Wikispaces Projects, you know they are a great way to get your students working in groups on their class projects or individually on their e-portfolios. In our recent release, we added a few improvements to make them even easier. You can now create new projects directly from your Actions sidebar. Simply click on the plus-sign button next to Projects to get started. And if you’re looking to manage your teams, you can do so from a single consolidated page. Click on Projects and then your project name to create or delete your project’s teams, change team permissions, add or remove team members, and set project events. We hope you enjoy these changes. If you’d like more information on Projects or how you can effectively use them in your classroom, be sure to check out these previous posts: Projects: A better way to work in classroom groups Tips and tricks: Group work in wikis Resources for Project-Based Learning

Join us tomorrow, December 11 at 11am PST, for our live panel on Common Core Standards. We’ll be speaking with Djuna Dudeck from the Pulaski County Special School District, Arkansas as she shares her experiences and insights around creating and implementing a strategy for the upcoming standards. It’s going to be both a fun and informative event. We hope to see you there. Register for tomorrow’s panel.

On Tuesday 18 December at 5pm Pacific, we’ll be participating in a Future of Education podcast with our good friend Steve Hargadon. After reading our recent How to Succeed in Ed-Tech article, Steve suggested a conversation about education entrepreneurship with us and his brother Andrew who is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at UC Davis. As with anything Steve does it should be thoughtful and energizing. We’re looking forward to it. Please join us at 5pm US Pacific time on Tuesday 18 December at http://futureofed.info Update: The recording is now available.

Join us on January 22 at 11am PST as we explore one of the most popular uses for wikis: knowledge bases. Whether you’re in charge of building an archive of standards and procedures in your company, a teacher setting up a collaborative research project for your students, or a district administrator looking to create a shared curriculum resource for your educators, we’ll help you build it. Join us for the free hour-long event and learn to get started with your own online resource database. Update: A recording of the event is now available. Enjoy and let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

We get so inspired working with our users every day and seeing the amazing ways they organize their online world. We’ve highlighted a few sites and tips below. We think you’ll love them and leave feeling inspired. Add a Custom Logo Adding a custom logo is an easy way to noticeably improve the look of your site. Brendan Flynn, a Wikispaces Private Label customer from Bristol-Plymouth Regional Technical School, has helped teachers across his district create wikis. He shared his experience with us: "When it comes to designing logos, less is more. I always tell students to design logos first in just black and white. Take color out of the equation." Banner-like logos - i.e. narrow logos that span the top of the wiki - are a great way to go. You can take full advantage of the space at the top of your page. You may also want to consider adding a transparent background to your logo as Brendan has. This way, your logo can blend in with your existing background. There’s plenty of software out there to do it, but two free and easy ones are Google Drawings and Pixlr. Read more about adding a logo to your homepage and let us know how yours ends up. (Note: if you have a lot of wikis in your organization, using our Private Label service comes in handy here as well. You can assign your school logo to the top of every school wiki by default.) Add a Welcome Message The front page of your Wikispaces wiki or the Home wiki on your Private Label site is important real estate. It’s the first thing your users see, so we encourage users to take time to edit it and welcome folks stopping by. Coonara Community House Training in Melbourne, Australia has done an excellent job of this. Their home page has a simple welcome message describing the goals of the site, their contact information in case anyone needs to reach them, and a picture to spruce up their site. You may also want to check out their Ementor wiki. There they share specific information about who they are and how their visitors can use and navigate the wiki. And with a few small changes - a great color scheme and an embedded Voki widget - their wiki became a fun place to visit. We spoke with Karen George at Coonara about her experience. "Every day, we are learning new things, adding widgets and gadgets to make the learner experience much more engaging. We also don’t forget about our trainers. The sites need to be pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate and easy to find the information we need. We are all time poor so design and ease of use is a must. Tutors who once resisted are now using the sites to get their work done…It’s now an expectation that all staff access appropriate wiki sites to keep themselves informed." Kristine Roshau and Concordia University do a great job combining a clear welcome message with a snazzy logo. Take a look below. Create an Editable Website We recently unveiled a new option for your wiki: our editable website mode. This mode lets you hide the management tools of the wiki so your users see a simple clean interface. A lot of our users have told us they love this new mode, including Karen from Coorana. She chooses this mode when creating wikis for groups who need to view and access resources on a site but won’t be editing. Use Buttons for Navigation Maria Sardo and her colleagues from Sysco have created an easy-to-use homepage for their wiki on their Private Label site. Diane, a member of their team, created a beautiful streamlined design that uses graphics for navigation buttons. Her team uses them to easily move around the site. Sharmaine Sharusan, a Private Label customer from Everest College, created a smartphone-like experience for her users and shared her design secrets with us. "I used a simulated button design to mimic the familiarity of apps that most users are accustomed to seeing on their smartphones. Most of those links open in a new window/tab while still allowing them to have access to the original homepage. "Additionally, I chose the size of the buttons in order to fit on screens with lower resolutions. And I chose icons and words for the visual recognition of the service/website they would be accessing. The other clever thing I did was make each row a separate page. The same buttons can be seen on other sites within our Private Label. In the long-run, this makes it easier to swap out icons on the homepage just by making a change on the included page." Create a Site Directory on Your Homepage In large schools and districts, the amount of resources and information can be daunting. By adding a little structure, Mike Baker of South Side Area School District in Pennsylvania, made it easy for people to access and add to the information they want. "We use our Private Label as our students’ homepage in the computer lab. This allows even Kindergarten students to click the home button and go directly to a common starting point. We have our students using the ‘Rover’ app on their iPads and going to the bookmarked student wiki. All of the district’s online learners access various courses via our wiki. This concept is quick to edit and keeps students organized." Above are a few simple ideas for creating a stunning, easy-to-navigate, and effective home page. We hope you’re inspired by your fellow users’ designs. We’re always looking to see more. Feel free to share your work of art with us at help@wikispaces.com or on Twitter.

If you’re a data lover, you’re going to love our latest feature: downloadable tables. You can now take the data on your wiki or Private Label site - who your users are, your discussion topics, the tags on your wiki based on frequency, even who is monitoring content on your site - and download these lists as convenient .csv files. Use these files to easily track and manage activity, create graphs to illustrate the activity and effectiveness of your site over time, and much more. Your data is now yours to explore and manipulate. Our more popular downloadable lists include: All users on your site or wiki All wikis on your site All public wikis on your site Revisions to a wiki page Page discussion topics To download your data, head to any data table on your site, scroll to the bottom of the table and click Download. It’s that easy. We’d love to hear which data sets you love the most and what you’ve found by exploring your data. Let us know in the comments below or via Twitter.

As of April 5, 2013, we will no longer support Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7) on Wikispaces. Starting March 12, visitors to any Wikispaces site using IE 7 will see a warning banner linking to this blog post. We will continue to support Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10 as well as modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you are using IE 7 we encourage you to upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer by running Windows Update or by contacting your IT department. If you can’t upgrade Internet Explorer we heartily recommend Chrome or Firefox. Internet Explorer 7 was released almost seven years ago in October 2006. Microsoft has since release three new major IE versions, with IE 10 launching at the end of 2012. Given the tiny percentage of visitors who still use IE 7 on Wikispaces, we can’t continue to justify the amount of work that is required to maintain support. We’re in good company; Google and Facebook both stopped supporting IE 7 in 2011. And, critically, your choice of safe, fast, and free alternatives has never been better. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@wikispaces.com.

Joe Mazza started the Knapp’s Family Engagement Wiki in March of 2010. We spoke with Gwen Pescatore, Knapp Elementary’s Home & School President. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do. We are an elementary school in Lansdale, PA. Our wiki page is our one-stop location where families can find all info for both our school and our Home & School Association. We not only use it to share our information, but also to encourage two-way communication and family involvement. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Not being the one who edits the page, but as a parent and contributor of information….my favorite feature is the ability for us to add widgets (such as a translator). We have over 20 languages spoken at our school and without this option, we limit our ability to share information with so many of our families. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We use the wiki to share the basics, such as our school calendar, policies and parent association’s monthly meeting minutes, but also to engage families in the two-way communication that we want so much. We do this by embedding a Twitter feed on the front page which shows tweets from throughout the school day, and adding forms, such as the eBucket Filler, for families to fill out when a student has done something worthy of recognition (even when not in school). 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" There is no one "Aha" moment, but knowing that we conveniently have one place where families can find everything - links to our social media feeds, videos and pictures shared from the school day and events, postings of school policies and event flyers, an easy to complete form to commend a student’s good deed or act - all right from the wiki, is priceless. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Knapp values the importance of families having the knowledge about what their students are doing and can be doing at school, believes in providing the resources for all students to be their best, and encourages all families to be actively involved in their student’s education.