In this Tips and Tricks, we’ll take a look at Google Forms and how educators are embedding them in their wikis to create more interactive online classrooms. Create a survey Want to make your classroom a two-way conversation? Add a survey to your wiki and get feedback from your students on a particular unit. Or create a wiki page highlighting your recent class field trip and invite parents to fill out a survey on their chaperoning experience. Build an online quiz Looking to spruce up your quizzes? Embed a weekly vocabulary quiz on your wiki that your students can answer online. Or create practice quizzes for your students to do at home in preparation for the big exam. By embedding the quizzes on your classroom wiki, your students will always know where to head to find the latest test. Engage the community Looking to connect your classroom with the community? Have your students create online polls around a particular unit, embed them on the wiki, and invite members of your local or Twitter community to fill them out. Your kids will love seeing the wiki stats change as people outside the classroom engage with what they’re learning. In return, your community will get a peek into your classroom and all the great things you’re doing on your wiki. Handle simple administrative tasks Want an easier way to handle those little administrative tasks? Create a checklist for your daily attendance to easily mark students as present or absent. Or create a form for classroom observations or student assessments. You’ll be able to access your data online in a Google Spreadsheet. To add a Google Form to your wiki: Head to your Google account, and then to Google Drive. Click Create and choose the Form option. Create your quiz. You can choose between multiple choose questions, check boxes, text responses and more. Once you’ve finished adding your questions, click the Send Form button at the top right. Choose Embed and copy the HTML code that appears. Return to your wiki and edit the page where you’d like to put the quiz. Go to the Widget tool in the toolbar and down to Other HTML. Paste the embed code there and click Save. Save your page to see the form. The responses to this form will appear in a Google Spreadsheet. These are just a few ideas of how you can use Google Forms on your wiki. We’d love to hear other ways you’re using them. Feel free to comment below or let us know on Twitter.

A wiki is a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use platform for sharing knowledge across your organization. It’s also one that you and your employees will love using. Here are some of the reasons Wikispaces makes knowledge sharing a breeze: It’s as simple as Edit, Type, Save Wikispaces is designed so that anyone can use it, regardless of their technical know-how. Our single-click Edit button and Visual Editor make adding content as easy as editing a Word Document. Give it a try in our Sandbox wiki. Add relevant resources, regardless of their file type or location Our Link, File, and Widget tools let you pull together all your valuable resources. Found a great article on market changes in your industry, go ahead and link to it. Created a training video for new employees, embed it on the New Employee’s page. Have a great sales proposal template, share it on your department’s page. Regardless of what format your knowledge takes - video, slideshow, document, text, audio, Twitter feed - you can add it to your wiki. Track the conversation With History, and Recent Changes, you can easily keep track of who is speaking and what content they’re adding. If you have a question about any contribution, you can always reach out to the author. And with email Notifications, you can see who’s making changes at any moment, and jump into the conversation as it’s happening. A platform that bends with you, not the other way around Most importantly, Wikispaces lets you organize your information in the way that works best for you. You can begin by creating a series of subpages for each department, regional office, or projects. As small work groups sprout up to plan a conference or prepare for a large release, they can create pages and structures that work for them. And if individuals just want keep tabs on their own pages, they can do so with our Tags feature. Wikis aren’t rigid structures you have to follow; they change and grow based on your organization’s needs. Take a look at our recent webinar on Building Knowledge Bases to learn more about creating and using a wiki knowledge base in your organization: Set up a knowledge base for your business or organization If you’re looking for a knowledge base for your organization, you might consider our Private Label service. With additional features like unlimited wikis, your own branded environment, and integration with your existing systems, Wikispaces Private Label is a powerful collaborative platform for your organization.

We’re running a survey to learn what you think about Wikispaces so we can make it even better for you. The survey is completely confidential and only takes a couple of minutes to fill out. We’d love to hear from you. Click here to fill out the survey. We’d really appreciate it. Thank you.

Are you attending the Sloan Consortium / MERLOT Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in Las Vegas this week? Us too. Wikispaces Co-Founder James Byers will be at the conference from Tuesday - Thursday and would love to meet up and talk about how wikis fit into your world. James will also be kicking off Thursday’s events with a breakfast presentation, "Ed-Tech Startups: Lost in the Desert?" He’ll be digging into the unique challenges faced by education startups and look at how founders, investors, and most importantly students and teachers can play a part in building sustainable companies. Whether or not you’re attending SLOAN-C, our paper "How to Succeed in Ed-Technology" gives you the background about how we at Wikispaces think about the education startup world. If you’d like to meet up please drop us a note at help@wikispaces.com.

James and I will be attending the ASU/GSV Education Innovation Summit in Phoenix next week. We’re looking forward to meeting and being inspired by a lot of great entrepreneurs and teachers. We wrote a short piece for their blog to stimulate discussion about how people in ed-tech define and pursue success. Let us know if you’re going to be at the event in Phoenix so we can meet up and of course please share your thoughts on what a successful ed-tech company looks like to you.

Today we are extraordinarily pleased to announce Wikispaces Classroom to the world. Wikispaces Classroom is a brand new product from the Wikispaces team entirely and exclusively for teachers and students. Over the years we’ve distilled what we believe and do into one simple thing: help teachers help students. And Wikispaces Classroom is our attempt to take that to the next level. When we ask ourselves, our users, and our customers, what we can do to better help teachers help their students, the message always comes down to three things: Keep it simple. Help teachers and students engage deeply. Help teachers improve student outcomes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. Simplicity. Wikispaces was built to help people work together. All kinds of people, in all kinds of contexts. Over the years we made it easier and easier for teachers and students to use Wikispaces but there were always parts of Wikispaces that weren’t designed for the classroom and frankly, got in the way. In Wikispaces Classroom, all that is gone. It’s streamlined and focused, it puts everything you need to manage your classroom right up front, and it gets everything you don’t need right out of the way. Engagement. Wikispaces has always been about engaging teachers and students in meaningful activity and communication in and around the learning process. For Wikispaces Classroom we’ve designed an entirely new way to manage and talk about everything that goes on in our class. Featuring a modern newsfeed, and a simple way to manage assignments, announcements, events, and all of your resources and work, it’s everything you and your students love about social networking but private, in your classroom, and integrated with your day to day work. Improve Outcomes. We know that the key to improving student outcomes, however you define them, is to help teachers understand what is happening with each student every day, so that they can spend their time helping each student the way that student needs to be helped. Wikispaces has always had an enormous amount of data about what students are doing, and how they are doing, under the hood, and so we just decided to give that data to teachers in a way they can actually use. In formal terms, it’s formative assessment. In our terms, its our way of making the lives of teachers easier, and helping them help more kids, more efficiently, and more effectively. And of course, Wikispaces Classroom is free for teachers and students. You can create a new Wikispaces Classroom now, or convert an existing wiki to Wikispaces Classroom in your Settings area. We’ll be posting more detail every day this week, so stay tuned, and let us know what you think. We’ll be hosting weekly webinar tours; sign up here.

Teachers are busy. Students are busy. Managing 30-to-150 of them and their work in the classroom can take a lot of extra time that could be spent planning engaging lessons. Our new free product, Wikispaces Classroom, helps teachers be more productive by saving time managing and organizing student information. We’d like to introduce you to The News Feed. News Feed We know that comments, messages, and discussions can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of all of your great wiki pages. The News Feed is your Classroom Homepage and has some helpful features to keep you and your students on track in a simple and engaging way. This is a stream of information from you and all students on your Wiki, including Discussions, Projects, and Events. Students can reply on each thread, making for easy and instant communication. You can even enable Email Notifications to stay on top of things as soon as possible. Projects Projects are a great feature that have been a part of Wikispaces for a while, and with the Wikispaces Classroom News Feed, we think it will be even simpler for you to create and manage them. Directly from the News Feed, you can choose "Project," enter a description, and a start date and an end date, and then you are immediately taken to create a Project. The Projects homepage puts all of your projects in one place to organize. Looking for ideas? Think of anything in your class that you would assign your students, either individually or collaboratively- a Literature Circle Book Group, a research page for a writing project — and you can create it from the News Feed and track its progress from the Projects menu. Best of all, from the News Feed, you can choose who to direct a Discussion to by Project, making it easy for you to send information to each group. This is a great way to have one Wiki for your course, but different Teams for each of your classes and/or projects and communicate with them separately. Events and Calendar Check out the Calendar Feature, top and center, highlighting upcoming Assignments and Events that you plan for students. In addition to Discussions and Projects, you now can easily create Events on the News Feed. Events then appear on the Calendar tool, which includes a list of the next few upcoming Events and Projects as well as a traditional calender view. The Calendar is particular to each student, so they’ll only see items that are applicable to them. The Calendar makes it easy to keep track of assignments. And of course, your regular wiki Pages are still there, on the top right, for you to make classroom subject-based wikis and resources just like before. Want to get started? Simply choose "Wikispaces Classroom" when you create a new wiki, or go to "Settings" and change your Wiki Type to Classroom to convert your current wiki. Stay tuned this week as we highlight more Wikispaces Classroom news and features, and register for a live webinar tour here.

One of the most powerful things you can do as a teacher is personalize your students’ learning. We know it’s no easy feat, however, with class sizes making it difficult to differentiate and keep track of each student’s progress. In an effort to help you with this challenge we’ve built Wikispaces Classroom’s Formative Assessment feature. As an organizer of your Classroom, you have an orange bar along the top of your wiki that students don’t. It easily allows you to access Members, Projects, Settings and Assessment. Formative Assessment The first thing you’ll see when you click Assessment, is your Engagement page. Each of your students appears on the Engagement page, and you get an accurate and real-time reading of their activity on the wiki. You’ll be able to monitor their level of contribution, see whether they are reading or writing, and give them support when and where it’s needed. The graphs are constantly refreshing, so you can stay on track even in the middle of your lesson. Try it on your iPad. When you start your writing lesson, and dispatch your students to work on their research with each other, you can walk around the class and see their activity. Differentiation has never been easier. An easy key helps you read the engagement graph. The circles next to each name help you quickly identify students who are extremely active, online doing moderate work, or not online at all. The graphs for each student highlight if they are online viewing a wiki (the thick green line), typing characters into a wiki (the thick black bars), or have recently saved a new page version (red dots). At a quick glance, you can see who in your class might be having a slow start and immediately provide the support or encouragement they need. Follow your students’ engagement by student or project. While seeing which students are active is good, being able to see specific work done by a student is even better. By clicking on the one of the red dots, you’ll pull up the actual page edit the student did, allowing you to see any deletions and insertions and gauge their understanding of the assignment. Directly from here, you can insert comments and discussion posts to encourage the student and provide feedback. Click on the graph to view real-time page edits from students. You can monitor engagement by user or by Project. By switching to Project View, you can glance at activity by each individual team, helping you spot check a struggling group and provide assistance. Use the Filter dropdown to choose a specific project quickly. View engagement by projects. In the near future we’ll add the ability to choose the time increment right up on top so you can decide at what level you’d like to assess your students. The more recent the assessment, the more formative your use of it can be. Looking back over time allows you and your students to prepare for summative assessments and parent/teacher and student-led conferences. Best of all, our Formative Assessment feature works great on mobile devices, allowing you to track this information while on the go in your room, not shackled to your desk. We know 21st century educators are an active bunch, moving about their classrooms as students collaborate with each other. Now you can keep tabs on up-to-the-minute activity by keeping your tablet or phone on the Engagement page and noting if anyone needs your help. Sign up for one of our live tours, happening once a week, to learn more.  

A big part of our focus for Wikispaces Classroom was making things easier. We removed features people weren’t using or got in the way. We made the layout cleaner, simpler, and harder to break. And we also exposed the powerful functionality we have under the hood in ways that make it really easy to do the things you want to do. There are many different ways for a teacher to organize their digital classroom these days, from the bare minimum to intricate learning management systems. With Wikispaces Classroom, we wanted to give you what you love about Wikispaces — its simplicity and ease of use — along with an extra layer of management for the classroom that we hope you’ll find equally simple, for you and students alike. This first thing you’ll notice is the overall theme change — there is a standard background, settings bar, and navigation bar to make it easy for your students to focus on their work and for you to focus on them. Organizer Bar The Organizer Bar lets you access Members, Settings, Projects, and Assessments. We’ve taken the settings you most care about as a teacher and put them at the top of each Wikispaces Classroom page so you can access these controls whenever you need them. These used to exist in the right-hand navigation bar, now you can access the most important aspects of managing your wiki - Members, Projects, Assessment, and Settings in a way that is separate from your pages. And when students log in, they don’t see this bar, meaning they can just focus on the Pages and Projects they are working on. Navigation Bar The Navigation Bar has always been the hub for access to all of your Wiki pages. In Wikispaces Classroom, we’ve pared it down to be just what you need. A link to your News Feed will always be on top as the central location for up-to-the-minute information on your wiki. Below that, you’ll see a collection of your Pages, which you can now organize even more. Just click and drag up and down to reorder, or click "Edit Navigation" to turn off "All Pages" and use Tags instead. However you use it, you’ll notice it’s designed to help you focus on just your important Pages. The Navigation Bar now only features News Feed, Pages, and Tags. Settings We’ve taken all the functionality of the old Manage Wiki area and renamed it Settings with a whole new look and feel that’s cleaner and more intuitive. Not only do you access it on the top Organizer Bar, but now you can quickly move between each section of the Settings area from one page. We think you’ll find it much simpler to use. Settings is now more streamlined and easier to use. We can’t wait to see how you and your students use Wikispaces Classroom, and we think these changes add up to a whole new experience that allows you to focus on engaging your students and improving their outcomes. Learn more about Wikispaces Classroom at one of our upcoming webinar tours, and join our Twitter #wclassroom Challenge online this month, sharing your Wikispaces Classroom with the world. Simply Tweet a link to your site with #wclassroom today.

Moritz Lehmann started the CBCL Showcase wiki in Jan of 2013. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: CBCL Limited provides excellence in engineering and related services in Atlantic Canada, headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We use wikis to set up project-specific websites serving primarily as knowledge bases, communication platforms and progress-tracking tools. This wiki is used to manage a large environmental monitoring project. We take thousands of samples per year all across the province. The wiki allows us to keep track of our progress and provides essential information to staff in the field. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? We love the ability to easily integrate content from services such as Google Earth and Picasa. This provides functionality and a rich experience to our users. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Technologists returning from field work upload their GPS tracks, photographs and other information to the wiki to report their progress to project managers and clients almost in real-time. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I was in the field one day getting ready to launch a boat to take samples. At that time, strong winds were picking up from the southwest and I had to abandon my planned sampling run. I was able to consult the wiki to find a nearby and sheltered sampling area. The wiki told me that this area had not been sampled previously and allowed me to download the location of sampling stations to my iPad. That way, it saved my schedule and money. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "Your pages may not be the most beautiful or fancy, but they sure get a lot of use!"

We’re very excited to be reading your tweets, blog comments, and emails about how you’re getting started with Wikispaces Classroom. We wanted to share with you a few basic steps to get your online classroom up and running without too much work. Note: if you are a Private Label customer, Wikispaces Classroom features will be rolling out in the coming weeks so we can get things just right for you! Starting with your Existing Site We know many of our users have amazing Wikispaces.com and Wikispaces Private Label sites already set up and running effectively. The first step to trying out Wikispaces Classroom is going into your Settings and switching it to Classroom mode. Remember once you switch, Settings will be up top on your Organizer Bar. Basic Wikispaces Page Now you’ll notice a few things change. First your theme will be standardized. For the moment, all Wikispaces Classrooms have this simple theme so that we can guarantee a really good user experience and you and your students can focus on your work. To change to Classroom, simply go to Settings. None of your data will be lost in the change and you can always change back. We hope you’ll love the new environment, though, and look forward to any feedback you have that will help us make the transition even easier. Preparing Your Students While many of your students may be tech-savvy, they’ll still need to learn the norms of your online classroom to maximize their learning time on the site. The first thing you’ll need to do, of course, is get them there! If you don’t already have accounts for students, you can easily create them under Settings-User Creator. Make your student accounts with User Creator. Since Wikispaces Classroom is a social environment, we encourage teachers to have students create avatars that represent themselves the first day. There are many fun avatar creators out there, like the Simpsons Ride creator we used, and you can find one suitable for your class with a quick online search for "avatar creator." To get started, simply have your students click on their username in the top right of the page and then click on Settings. After that, they can click "Change picture" to upload their picture. Teachers, don’t forget to make one for yourself! It all adds to the creation of motivation and community in your Wikispaces Classroom. Easily add a picture to your profile. Setting Up Your Newsfeed Last week, we highlighted how the Newsfeed works- it’s the new homepage for your Wikispaces Classroom. Now that your students are created and have avatars, you’re ready to give them something to do! Starting a Discussion is easy- think of a question you’d like the whole class to respond to. It could be homework and something they respond to before coming into class, or perhaps it’s a mid-class break where you’d like to collect all of their feedback. Whatever the question, post it and watch your students easily respond! All Discussions on the News Feed continue to aggregate here, so you can start new ones, go back to old, and Monitor or Lock your posts. Best of all, students can pose their own questions for the class, and then see their classmates’ thoughts on their questions. Setting up norms with your Newsfeed. The next step is to plan for your Discussions- when will you post, when will students be expected to post, and what are acceptable comments? We have seen Wikispaces teachers create wonderful lessons for preparing students to collaboratively write and can’t wait to hear how you prepare them for the News Feed. A good rule of thumb is to allow for practice and modeling of great comments and potentially allowing for online participation to figure into your assessments. We hope these are helpful for your first steps into Wikispaces Classroom- the easiest part is just switching it on in Settings. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be highlighting other ways to get started- stay tuned for Projects! Please watch more on our archived Wikispaces Classroom Demo and Tour or sign up for an upcoming live tour. Once you make your Classroom, we’d love it if you’d join our #wclassroom Challenge on Twitter! Simply tweet out your Classroom and how you’re using it with #wclassroom. Don’t have Twitter? Comment below.

We love projects in education and think they’re powerful ways for students to show their understanding of a topic and to explore areas of their own interest. We created our Projects feature last year to help facilitate and manage projects in the classroom. In Wikispaces Classroom, Projects are integrated right from the beginning of your experience. *Note- all you need to get started is to go to Settings and select Classroom as your Wiki Type. Private Label folks, coming very soon! Organization Bar Wikispaces Projects are spaces for your students to work in that you can share with only those people you want to be involved. Students can work together in their own space, you can monitor and manage each project, and now, with Classroom, you can use our new Assessment feature to see how students in each Project are doing. Let’s walk you through how to get a Project up and running. To get started, once you’re in your Wikispaces Classroom, you can either create a Project directly on the Calendar, or go to the Projects link on the top Organizational Bar and start from there. The advantage of starting your Project on your Calendar is 1) the Project will show up for you and your students on the News Feed and 2) you can assign start dates and end dates as you create your Project. You’ll know you’re creating a Project because of the small Project icon on the top right of your post. Just like any other News Feed item, you can also send an email about it to all your students and disable comments if you like. Allowing comments however means that students can discuss and ask questions about the Project right from the News Feed. Starting a Project Once you click Create, you’ll be taken to the Project page. You’ll see your class list on the right, and you’ll be prompted to create Teams. Each team will have their own area to work in, with their own permissions. Once you create Teams, you can either drag and drop students to assign them to Teams or upload a .csv file that has student usernames in one column and the Team you want each student in in the other. You can also Assign Randomly and try your luck with groupings. If there are some pairings that simply won’t work, you can just drag them into a different box. Problem solved! Creating Teams Assigning Members Once your Teams are set, you can also set their Permissions. Do this one by one (by clicking on the lock that says "Private," which is the default setting,) or click "Set All Permissions" at the bottom to set them in one fell swoop. You can also click on the Calendar to track events and due dates for each individual project. Permissions If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute. Project Home Page When you click on each individual team, you’ll be taken to that team’s Home Page. You’ll see the pages in that team’s Project listed, and you can track recent changes and any other Pages or Files the Team members have added. Pages If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click "Projects." The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive. Project List If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute. If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click "Projects." The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive. Assessment Every good project needs a way for the teacher to quickly monitor what’s going on, and our Assessment tool is a great way to do just that. If you click "Projects" inside your Assessments tool, each of your Projects will display showing recent activity, both reading and writing. For now, you can only filter by the last 30 minutes, but soon you’ll be able to view activity over time, making for incredible opportunities for formative assessment. Imagine being able to tell the "Cs through Unn" team what an awesome job they’re doing, and giving the "He through Ne" team a nudge and the support they need to succeed- all within the same class period. The sky really is the limit when you set up Projects in your classroom. They can be small assignments, large, several month-long projects, or year-long projects, like a space for weekly writing, an ePortfolio, or individual projects. We can’t wait to hear how you use them. Stay tuned this week as we cover more about the Assessment tool, and do join us for our online Wikispaces Classroom Office Hours and Tour next Tuesday at 4PM Sydney, Australia time! Also feel free to share your classroom here or on Twitter with the #wclassroom hashtag to enter our contest.

We hope you’ve had a good time experimenting with Wikispaces Classroom and its new features- we’ve certainly enjoyed hearing your feedback and seeing your examples on Twitter, the blog, and via email. One thing we know you’re trying out is the Navigation, a wiki’s hub to get where you need to go. At its core, the Classroom Navigation is still very similar to a Classic Wiki page’s navigation. As a default, "All Pages" makes an alphabetical list of all of your pages on the right-hand side of your wiki. We know that you often want different navigation, however. By clicking "edit navigation" at the bottom, you’ll get the following options: The first thing you can do is reorder your pages. Simply drag and drop the page where you’d like it to show up. You’ll also see an "x" appear next to "All Pages." If you click that, it removes "All Pages" from your navigation bar. But don’t worry, you can get it back anytime by clicking the new "Add All Pages" button that appears. If you decide to keep "All Pages" deleted, then you’ll need to set up navigation another way: Tags. Tagging allows you to label each page with one or several Tags, and then when you add that Tag to your Navigation, users can find all pages associated with that Tag. The first thing you’ll need to do is tag your Pages. Looking at all of your pages, you’ll need to decide what your categories, or tags, will be. For example, you might want all of these pages- Mathematics, Reader’s Workshop, Science, and Social Studies- to show up under the tag "Resources." First, type in the word Resources where it says "Tag" and press "Add." It will create a category in the Navigation bar but it will be empty because there are no pages with that tag yet. To tag some pages, go to "Pages and Files" above the Navigation. It will bring up a list of all of the Pages and Files in with your Classroom. First, click the small box on the left of any page you want to tag with "Resources." Then go to the top of the page where it says "Edit Tags" and type in "Resources". Then press "Add tags." Now go check out your masterpiece under "Pages and Files." You’ll see your Tag name as a large header with a drop-down box of all of the pages you just tagged. Now you can repeat the process with other categories you’d like to show up in your Navigation. You may notice there is currently not a way to customize the navigation any further as you can in a Classic Wiki. In keeping with the theme of simplicity for Wikispaces Classroom, we wanted to keep Navigation as clean and simple as possible for students. To see more Navigation editing in action, watch one of our recent Wikispaces Classroom webinars here, or sign up for an upcoming event. Let us know how you decide to organize your wiki below!

You may have noticed a few subtle changes around the time we introduced Wikispaces Classroom. On Twitter, we saw that one of our favorite Wikispaces users, Gwyneth Jones, known widely as The Daring Librarian, did: It’s true! We love our plant logo as much as Gwyneth does as it’s been with us from the start, but with Wikispaces Classroom we felt it was time for a change. We originally thought about wikis as little communities carefully trimmed and shaped by their caretakers — hence the bonsai tree. We still do, but since education is our focus, we wanted a new logo that reflected that. By replacing the bonsai plant you all know and love, we hope we’re signaling to you how our design changes will reflect our focus teaching and learning. Think of everything you do on a wiki- editing a wiki truly is social writing, and we’ve been developing the best tool we can for writing socially in the past 7 years. Our new logo celebrates all of the writing that you can do with a wiki- writing your syllabus, writing an in-line comment giving timely feedback, writing a discussion prompt, adding to your colleagues’ writing by putting a few more words in or sharing a link- and puts it front and center. The four pencils in our new logo point to the center, symbolizing this convergence. Social writing in 2013 means your students have a global audience, and they’re more motivated than ever to write content that inspires. It means your students can be writing on a wiki with a buddy from Africa and compare and contrast their ideas and words with someone half a world away. Our new Classroom features the Newsfeed at its heart, which puts student and teacher writing and ideas at the front of every classroom wiki, where responses can flow easily and in one place. Comments are even easier, and discussions can happen on each page for every piece of content you have. We really like the change, and hope you do too. Let us know how social writing has changed your world below.

My wiki adventures began in early 2010. I originally planned to use my class wiki as an online message board to keep parents informed about what was happening in my class of 10-11 year olds and to post information, such as homework assignments and important dates. The wiki format was quick and easy to use and the "What you see is what you get" editor suited the needs of a busy teacher. The collaborative nature of Wikispaces meant that the children were soon getting in on the action and making their own pages. There were pages dedicated to sport teams, pets, gymnastics, art tutorials and even cookery tips. The children began uploading images and text without me even showing them how to edit the page. We started to use Wikispaces more frequently in class and eventually we ditched our class page on the school learning platform and started using our Wikispaces page as our online hub. The children began to make even more impressive pages with embedded content and media from around the web. One memorable project involved the class making their own TV production company, for which they wrote, designed, filmed and produced everything for their own TV show, including advertisements. We used a range of websites to help us, but every stage of the process was managed, collated and published on our class wiki. I began to upload most of my lesson resources to the wiki so that the children could access some of the material before they came into class and so they could get on with applying what they had learned as soon as they got there. I only found out much later that many educators were "flipping" their classrooms in this way. The response from the children and their parents was superb and we found that the wiki was getting hits from across the world. My class also worked on a collaborative project with our partner school in China using a separate wiki, http://speechbubbles.wikispaces.com. Both schools began making videos to teach each other our native languages. The children choose the words and phrases they thought would be useful to new learners. They made the videos in small groups between classes and edited them during the school’s tech club. This project caught the attention of the local government and I was asked to talk about using wikis in education at a number of conferences and meetings. More and more teachers from other schools contacted me about the resources I was sharing and about how they could create their own wikis in their schools. In December 2010, I setup a wiki that was designed to share the interesting things I found online with teachers in my school and with educators around the world. Three years and many awards later, the ICTmagic wiki at http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com receives thousands of hits each day and it is full of resources for every kind of teacher. Now with the new "Classroom" setting, our wiki page has become even more useful and interactive. The front page allows you to add messages and create a feed for parents and the children. There is also a project feature which allows you to manage classroom assignments and homework by creating teams and pages for a special project. The assessment tool allows me to see which parts of a wiki page were edited by whom and how long they worked on it, making it easy to ensure that everyone is pulling their weight and to help or congratulate individual children on their posts. It is not hyperbole to say that using wikis has changed the way I teach, learn and collaborate with my class and with other educators. Start on your own wiki adventure and see where it takes you. Martin Burrett (@ICTmagic) is a Year 5/6 teacher at Mersea Island School in Essex UK. He is an educational speaker and an advocate for using digital technology to improve teaching and learning in schools.

We’re excited to announce two new education widgets available today for embedding on your wikis: DOGOnews and DOGObooks. We’re also proud to support the DOGObooks Summer Reading program. Keep reading to learn more! Embed DOGO Content on Your Pages DOGOnews is a great source for current events, news and non-fiction articles for kids and teachers. DOGOnews articles are written specifically for children and are a favorite source for language arts, science and social studies lesson plans in the classroom and current events homework help at home. DOGObooks is where kids discover, review and rate the books they love. All book selections and reviews are moderated prior to being published. Now you can embed news and book summaries from both sites on Wikispaces! In the Wikispaces Editor, click Widget, choose the new Education category, and select DOGOnews or DOGObooks. Search for the content you’re looking for, click Select, and click Insert. DOGObooks Free Summer Reading Program The DOGObooks Summer Reading program is designed to help students keep up their reading skills and continue developing their critical thinking and writing skills by writing reviews and sharing their opinion with peers. Nothing motivates students more than rewards, which is why DOGObooks is giving away one free book for every three books students read and review. And the top ten participating schools will win two hundred books! For Students Visit the Summer Reading Program page and fill out the consent form Select and read three books from the reading list and review them on DOGObooks Win a free book The reading list is comprised of over 80 elementary and middle school titles carefully selected by leading children’s book publishers, to ensure there is something to suit every reader. Students who complete three reviews can choose their free prize from a catalog of over 4,000 great books, and can continue to collect awards until all the free books are gone. Win Books For Your School Library DOGObooks also lets kids give credit to their schools for their reviews. The top ten schools that score the most reviews will win 200 (gently used) books for their library from Better World Books.

Earlier this year we wrote and shared a guide for ed-tech entrepreneurs and have enjoyed the ongoing conversation that has sprung up around it. If you’re in the San Francisco area this week, we’ll be continuing the discussion at the EdSurge SF Edtech Meetup. Our co-founder James Byers will be joining Jennifer Carolan (Managing Partner of NewSchools Venture Fund’s Seed Fund) and EdSurge CEO, Betsy Corcoran, to debate how education technology start-ups should fund themselves. The event will be on Thursday, June 20th, from 7-9pm in Redwood City, CA. Read more about the event and sign up here! Drop us a note if you’ll make it, we’d love to say hello. Update: For those of you who couldn’t attend, EdSurge recorded the event and posted some highlights here. Enjoy.

Today we’re announcing the availability of Wikispaces Campus, which brings Wikispaces Classroom to entire schools, districts, and universities. Over the past month, we’ve enjoyed sharing Wikispaces Classroom with you, our newest product that helps educators teach more efficiently, improves student outcomes, and increases student engagement. Wikispaces Campus is Wikispaces Classroom- with its News Feeds, Formative Assessment infrastructure, Project features, and of course traditional wiki pages- delivered as an enterprise service where your school, district, or university can create and administer accounts, apply school-wide permissions and custom theme settings, integrate with your internal systems and manage all of your teachers’ and students’ wikis from one easy-to-use dashboard.     Wikispaces Campus is priced per user starting at $1,000 a year- you can start a free month trial right now and request a live demo from our team to learn about how Wikispaces can help your teachers and students be more effective. If you currently are a Wikispaces.com Private Label Education customer, log in now and you’ll have Wikispaces Campus already enabled. If you are a Private Label customer and don’t currently see Wikispaces Campus, get in touch with us at help@wikispaces.com. Want to learn more? Join us this week at our Introduction to Wikispaces Campus webinar on Thursday, June 27th at 1PM PDT to learn all about Wikispaces Campus, including how to create an entire network of wikis and have full administrative control over every space, user and site-wide setting. We’ll also show you wiki templates, unlimited data storage and our integration features (Single Sign-On, Direct LDAP, and Google Apps.)

Julie Ramsay started the Ramsay’s Class Innovation Day wiki in January of 2012. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: This Wikispace was created by my class of fifth grade students at Fultondale Elementary School in Fultondale, Alabama. My students celebrate an Innovation Day each year. This is a day where students are 100% in control of their learning. Each student gets to pick a topic of interest to explore on this designated day. When that day arrives, they explore the topic in the manner that they learn best, become an expert, and then synthesize their newfound knowledge into a project that they use to teach their peers about their topic. This day is completely in their control. On the photos page of the Wikispaces, you can see their progress throughout the day. Also, any of the projects that were digital are published here and here. The creation of this page came about as a result of our class connections on Twitter (@RamsaysClass). My students were doing a countdown until our Innovation Day. Another class sent us a tweet asking us to explain Innovation Day. As a class, we discussed how to best explain it. One student expressed that it was impossible to express something so incredible in only 140 characters. That’s when they suggested we publish it as a webpage. Wikispaces was a perfect fit for this project. On their Innovation Day Wikispace, the students also included different projects that we did as preparation for Innovation Day. As a class, we read Mistakes that Worked and the students wrote book reviews. They were also intrigued by the idea of innovators and designed a project to each learn about an innovator that interested them; they created faKebook pages of each of them. You will also see testimonials of the students’ thoughts about Innovation Day which were created at the end of the day. Wikispaces was the perfect vehicle for my students to convey, share, and discuss their work with their global peers. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? In addition to the easily used "edit" button, my students and I really like the ability to embed projects from other sites such a Voki, Prezi, ProProfs, and Animoto. In addition to embedding their projects, we also enjoy being able to easily upload audio, video, URLs, images, and PowerPoints. The flexibility that Wikispaces offers makes it one of our favorite tools to communicate and collaborate with our global audience. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We use Wikispaces for many different aspects of our class learning environment. From posting class updates, to housing links to resources for lessons, to creating our own science "textbook," Wikispaces always helps me meet the diverse learning needs of my students. One tool does not fit all. Wikispaces provides me and my learners the ability to publish all our voices regardless of which tool we use to create. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I have been using Wikispaces with students for about five years now. It was the first collaboration Web 2.0 tool that I embraced. My students were doing a writing roulette with a class in Arizona. When my students saw how the other students were able to sign in and add to our story, their excitement shot off the charts. They were thrilled that others were not only reading and commenting upon their story, but also improving and helping them grow. That’s when I knew that Wikispaces would have a long term place within our class. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? "These fifth graders are awesome and I’m helping them share their learning with the world!"

We were very happy to join the "Learn with Michelle" Hangout on Air Series this past week! Michelle Pacansky-Brock and Robin Bartoletti from Academic Partnerships Faculty eCommons hosted us to talk all about wikis in education, from great classroom use cases to the new features in Wikispaces Classroom and its whole-school and whole-district package, Wikispaces Campus. We were especially excited to see Robin share her micro-MOOC (massive open online course), a professional development course using Wikispaces called "Engaging Technology and Online Pedagogy.". She’s created clear navigation week by week and great graphical headers to separate each week’s assignment, making it more than easy to follow along with the work. Michelle and APCommons have more great learning opportunities coming up- find out more here. And if you want to find out more about Wikispaces Classroom and Wikispaces Campus, do join us at one of our upcoming webinars!

Susan Brandon started the SharonBYOT wiki on the Forsyth County Schools Private Label site in June of 2012. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: I’m an Instructional Technology Specialist at the elementary school level and I created this wiki to serve as a resource for teachers in my school, as well as any other school who wants to use it. This was our first year embarking on the journey of becoming a ‘Bring Your Own Technology’ (BYOT) school. I’m proud to say 100% of our teachers joined this journey and our entire school embraced this initiative. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? I love that wikis are interactive and allow for collaboration. While this wiki is being used more for informational purposes for teachers, I love that we can set them up so teachers and students can interact and work collaboratively on projects. This year I collaborated with a teacher and we helped the students create a wiki based on what they learned about bridge construction. They were able to work at school and from home, which extended learning well beyond the school day. Students were able to add their own information, images, and videos to their pages, and share them with peers and adults. They loved that they were able to be more in charge of their own learning. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Using web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, helps make learning relevant for our 21st century learners. In addition to the bridge project, I’ve collaborated with teachers to create web-based resources for our students. An example of this is in this wiki for third grade. The wiki was used for students to research famous historical figures in their social studies curriculum. While this wiki is not as interactive (yet), it allows younger learners to utilize online research skills, while providing a more protected environment. Using teacher-selected sites within a wiki is one way to introduce online research. We then have the opportunity to extend learning and discuss why these websites are valid and relevant, while others are not. Then we can help our learners become more independent and prepared as they search for sites using student-friendly search engines. Using web 2.0 tools also creates a sense of responsibility among our learners, because their audience moves beyond classroom visitors and family members to a world audience. Another wiki I’m planning right now is more interactive and involves teaching students about digital citizenship via a webquest, where they’ll then become the educators. Webquests are great because they allow more interaction and can help differentiate learning for students by including schema building activities and extension opportunities as well. In my T-R-U-S-T webquest wiki, students will learn key ideas about being a positive digital citizen, as referenced in ISTE’s NETS-S standards. Students will use this wiki to learn from videos, scenarios, activities and a collection of websites linked from it. They will then have the opportunity to blog, take polls and even create their own video, digital story, or cartoon to share with others what they learned. I’ve found with using web-based tools, especially using wikis to engage learners, it is as easy as creating a word processing document, only the possibilities are endless. With so many students starting to have access to personal devices, learning can happen well beyond the school day. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" My aha moment came when I stepped back, handed over the creative control to our students, and watched what they came up with collaboratively. Once they learned how to create a wiki (and all the capabilities it has), they came up with so many creative ideas! Let me tell you, students take working on their wikis very seriously, because they know it can be viewed by a world audience, not just their teacher or parents. While as a teacher or tech coach you can set up parameters for your students, it is within this environment, we can truly model for our learners how to create a positive digital footprint. I can’t wait to use this resource even more next year. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? My wiki would say I’m willing to try something new and I want those who are beginning the BYOT journey to be successful. Most importantly, it would say I’m willing to collaborate and share my ideas with others, so they can learn, share, or create an even better resource for the rest of us to learn from. I look forward to learning from my fellow Wikispaces collaborators!

Looking to rename, lock, or delete a page? You can do all this and more just by heading over to your More Page Options button. Psst. It’s the button that looks like an ellipsis ( … ). From there, you can: Rename a page or redirect it to a different page on your wiki. Lock the page so only organizers can edit it. If you are on our Super, Private Label, or Campus plans, you can also set up Custom Permissions. You can hide pages from everyone but organizers, make a page on your private wiki available for anyone on the Internet to see, and more. Delete a page that you no longer need. Turn on notifications for a page you’d like to follow and receive emails or messages any time someone edits it. Tag your page and create your own personal classification system. View and print your page in various formats including as a PDF or Word document. And more. So check out More Page Options. You’ll be impressed by all you can do in just a few clicks.

We’re seeing teachers do great things already with Wikispaces Classroom, our new bespoke product for teachers and students which features our new Social Newsfeed and Formative Assessment features. Here are a few great classrooms to take a look at. Quite a few Wikispaces Classrooms are already alive with collaboration and communication, like Third Grade Thinkers: Senior Sub School Leader Jo Egan at Mentone Girls’ Secondary College is up to great things at the Science 9 Wiki. It takes advantage of the Projects feature in Wikispaces Classroom to assign different students to different project pages and give them feedback quickly and easily: Others, like Blair Einfeldt, Junior English teacher at Rock Springs High School in Rock Springs, Wyoming, are using Discussions for Literature Circles and debates. Check out his RSHS422 Wikispaces Classroom: And we’re always excited when people share their thoughts publicly. Richard Byrne shared a lovely blog post about his initial thoughts with "Wikispaces Introduces a Brand New Look for Classroom Wikis." As did Brian Beierle with "Wikispaces Adds Wikispaces Classroom." Over on the Twittersphere, there’s been lots of talk about Classroom: @j_allen says, "It looks pretty slick." @BethRitterGuth says, "Excited by the new Wikispaces Classroom! I can’t wait to show it to our faculty." @Sra_Barahona is excited to use Wikispaces for a third year in a row and is "extremely easy to build and very friendly for my grade 1 students." @KrisKing @alezeb @nuriasalvador @ellisinwonderla @MsCafarelli @mmatp all shared their interest in Wikispaces Classroom on Twitter as well- we’re excited to hear what you all think! We also recently released Wikispaces Campus, and we know @tim_leister and @mmkrill are excited to try these features out school-wide with their teachers. Want to help your students engage with their work using Wikispaces Classroom? Join us at one of our upcoming webinars, read our Classroom Blog Post tutorials, and follow the #wclassroom hashtag on Twitter.

Our team has loved seeing all of the creative examples of how teachers are using the new Wikispaces Classroom at schools this fall. We featured some of these amazing teachers, like "Coach E" Blair Einfeldt at Rock Springs High School in Wyoming, in our blog "Wikispaces in the Wild" last month. Mr. Einfeldt’s example of using Wikispaces Classroom’s Newsfeed, Projects, and Assessment features in his Literature Circle Project was so good, we asked him if he wouldn’t mind sharing how he set it up with all of you.   Mr. Einfeldt explains his Wikispaces Classroom site in detail below. "Our state requires that our Juniors do a ‘Lit Circle’ and as a group present their findings on a book of their choice. I decided that Wikispaces, with its built-in functionality of discussion forums, provided exactly what I was looking for. I decided to take all 4 of my Junior English classes, give them accounts, and put them in a big pot and divide them in groups using the Team feature in Projects. Since most of my students were in groups with kids that weren’t in their particular class, this forced group work to be done exclusively online and through the discussion threads. Wikispaces was perfect for providing a forum where they could present their findings in a professional, 21st-Century-Skills-driven way. To prepare my students, I spent an entire class period for them to get familiar with the wiki. They created a profile, added pictures, and completed a checklist of things I wanted them to do and treated it like more like missions to accomplish throughout the day. One small tip I learned from this was to have a small mini-lesson to help my students understand that this is academic writing even though it resembled a Facebook-type functionality. I had quite a few students type things that were more suited for social networking but after this lesson and practice the commenting improved. Be prepared for social justice- we had students calling group members out for not doing their jobs, mostly because I think they felt that they could be more blunt through the false sense of anonymity provided by computers. This was positive and negative, but they were much more demanding than I have ever seen in regular face-to-face group work. I also took full advantage of the great Assessment tool. This page helps you track who is doing what and we even turned it into a competition to see who could get the most page edits and words posted at the end of the project. I think the most beneficial part of our project was providing students a new way to do the same thing. They saw other classes doing it the same old way and felt a level of pride in that they were doing it in a technological way. It gave them the freedom to create and each page, post and discussion was different. I actually loved reading their discussion forums because I felt like I got more out of them this way than I would have in a classroom setting of 25+ students. They were all engaged, in charge of certain jobs which meant accountability, and all interested in the outcome. The other incredibly helpful thing about Wikispaces Classroom is that it is online and creates a broader audience. Being online, students could work on it at home, at school or even on their personal devices. Rather than presenting their findings to their group of friends, they had to be accountable to the entire online community. This forced students to be a bit more selective of what they put on there." Blair Einfeldt, Junior English Teacher and Coach Rock Springs High School, Wyoming Twitter: @kaynio Feel free to reach out to Blair to share your own ideas about using Projects in Wikispaces Classroom, and join us at our Back to School Night webinar this Sep. 12th at 6PM PDT. You can also click through his site below!