BOSCO is an organization using wikis and other technology to help give the isolated and war-affected people of Northern Uganda a voice in the global community. They started using Wikispaces Private Label back in 2009 and we’ve been sharing their amazing story of wikis in Uganda on our blog ever since. Recently, we were fortunate to hear an update from the field from Tom Loughran, Vice President of BOSCO and professor at the University of Notre Dame. He shared with us the incredible story of one woman using technology to make a difference. "You don’t often get a picture of your first meeting with someone you’ll grow to admire, but here’s mine. Notification of Latifah’s first post to the BOSCO wiki I first met Latifah as administrator and subscriber to the BOSCO-Uganda Wikispaces site. Her determination was evident from her first post; the remarkable circumstances that gave birth to that determination emerged only later. BOSCO’s web 2.0 training had found an eager student in Latifah. She quickly emerged as a leader of her site in the city of Coope, managing training around one highly-valued computer in a rented storefront. When she wasn’t training others, Latifah (also known as Akello and Monica as the Acholi don’t make a surname distinction) began to tell her story, online for the world to hear. I began to assist her online to help her with formatting and other technical editing, and became captivated by the tale she told.   Like everyone she knew, Latifah had been a victim of a brutal civil war, inheriting the aftermath of 20 years of cultural scouring. Like tens of thousands of Acholi children, she had been kidnapped and enslaved by the Lord’s Resistance Army. As she indicated, much of her experience was too painful to describe, a reluctance that must be measured against what she could bring herself to share: of being beaten to within an inch of her life for refusing to beat another child to death for the crime of attempting to return home; of forcible wedlock, in a group of young women all of whom faced a common life with promise of a common death if any of them escaped; of surviving and escaping through a government attack on the rebels; of returning home to shame and marginalization; of young teen pregnancy. But she also told of a father who loved her and urged her to take every challenge in life as an opportunity. And so she has. Latifah welcoming me to BOSCO’s Coope ICT site In March of 2010, after months of online interaction, we met ‘again for the first time’—this time face-to-face—as I toured the BOSCO Coope community site that continued to elect Latifah as their leader. Latifah showed me their one computer, one printer, and one solar-charged battery used to power both this hardware and a few small entrepreneurial activities (like cell phone charging) with what surplus power remained. In her attempts to train and engage the youth of her village, the scarcity of computing resources was a challenge. Latifah was helping Coope make the most of the opportunity. The computer Latifah managed in Coope During this time, Latifah continued to post regularly to the Wikispaces site. Writing about what she knew, she told of her hopes for law school to advocate for women’s rights, and shared at length about the cultural practices surrounding childbirth in traditional Acholi culture. Just this summer, she reflected on the press of isolation and hopelessness in the aftermath of the civil war, but how ICT (Information and Communications Technology, a phrase that most of the world uses to talk about computing) has been a source of hope in the lives of young people in the BOSCO-Uganda network. Latifah lives that hope. She summarized her intentions in one of her very many memorable posts: "This knowledge that have got from BOSCO i will always use it by posting in the Wikispaces, keep the togetherness, i will always try to work hard so that my life change and the life of my child change too and to always train the youth both sexes but i will also emphasize on the ladies who seem disadvantageous and i will make sure they learn the web 2.0 so that they can say all they have in their hearts so that they are relief from the pain by saying it out.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I met Latifah a third time, quite unexpectedly. Having taken employment in Gulu, she was volunteering in a new site—BOSCO’s Bardege Library—where I was installing a new computing center this past August, one of four such installations donated by HP as part of an Accenture supported partnership between BOSCO and the University of Notre Dame’s Initiative for Global Development. This project is a collaboration to create ecosystems where young people can receive entrepreneurial and ICT training in the presence of sufficient solar power to support the connectivity and catalyze entrepreneurial uses of renewable energy. During the past year as this partnership has emerged, I often remembered Latifah’s account of the hope that a single solar-powered computer brought to Coope. In many respects—by responding to the opportunity to learn, by training others, by telling her story, and by sharing local needs—Latifah brought these new HP computers to Northern Uganda. In the hands of determined young leaders like Latifah, they will be instruments of hope for many others." Students in the Bardege Library in Gulu gather around a cluster of energy-efficient HP thin client PCs, powered by a local solar micro-grid. Latifah has documented her journey and healing from the war on her wiki page for 6 years. We hope you’ll read her accounts here:

Antonio Juan Delgado García started the iescristoportfolio wiki in Dec of 2011. He shares his story in both English and Spanish. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: Our secondary school students and teachers are implementing online portfolios on our wiki iescristoportfolios. They use their portfolios to upload all kinds of personal and sharable information around the learning and teaching process. Our Language Portfolios consist of three main sections: A language passport: The students create a Glogster where they share their learning goals in their different languages. Glogster lets the students create a less formal and more attractive proposal for how they’ll develop throughout the year. A language biography: Here students reflect on the co-evaluation process and the use of portfolios in language learning. A dossier: Students share their main pieces of work. Some embed publications with Issuu while others create colorful and interactive portfolios with text, images, videos, Glogster, Vokis, and more. They are able to create their own space which reflects themselves. Besides the student portfolios, we also have other wiki sections to help educate and engage our students about the portfolio process: Learning about the portfolio: Here, we educate our students about the European Language Portfolio, its components, goals, and standards. Web 2.0 Tools: As teachers, we believe that using web 2.0 tools in the learning process can be really motivating. Our wiki is proof of this. We are continually adding new and interesting tools to make learning easier and better for our students. Integrated Learning Units: Our English Department coordinates with other school departments throughout the year. As a result, we have developed some interesting and motivating units where students bring their language learning skills into other departments including Social Sciences, Art, Technology, Maths, Portuguese and Spanish. Our goal is to expand and involve even more departments over this next year. European Language Portfolio (PEL) Activities: In this section, students and teachers can explore some of the activities designed by the Junta de Andalusia’s Counsel on Education, Culture, and Sports. The activities appear in different languages - German, French and English - which the kids can explore. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Definitely, the WIDGET Button. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Wikis have changed the way I teach. I use them as tools to motivate students and achieve a significant and real way of learning. I have created and designed many wikis, including one for my 12-16 year old secondary English students and one for my Bachillerato students (ages 16+). Both wikis are classroom wikis where you can see students’ personal dossiers, peer evaluations and self-assessments documents; and students can review grammar and vocabulary, see school assignments, and practice activities online. My other professonal wikis include: https://myenglishproject.wikispaces.com: A Learning English Project that won an eLearning Awards in 2009 for the Young Digital Planet silver award for "Foreign language learning through ICT". http://eportfoliosecundaria.wikispaces.com: A project that encourages students to learn English based on their own interests. Here, you can find a lot of classroom-ready material for both teachers and students. https://docentesenextremadura.wikispaces.com/: I teach courses in English and Spanish for teachers in Extremadura (Spain) related to ICT and English learning. This wiki lists a variety of educational resources for teachers as well as examples of education wikis in Spanish, English, and French for those of you who would like more example. https://zafra543.wikispaces.com/ - My personal wiki https://iescristodelrosario.wikispaces.com - My school’s wiki where parents and students can find information about the school and links to their teachers’ wikis. https://myenglishproject.wikispaces.com/Aplicaciones+Web+2.0+para+profesores+de+ingl%C3%A9s - Using wikis as a "reference website", I teach my students how to use web 2.0 tools. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" I’m a real fan of wikis. I came across wikis one summer day when I was idle with nothing to do. I grabbed a computer magazine and EUREKA! There they were…wikis and Wikispaces! I didn’t really know what they were about, but something inside me said that they were going to be play an important role in my life as a teacher. And they have. They’ve also reached into my personal life with wikis for my music band, community’s breast feeding association, local sports association, and former secondary school students. And that’s it! Wikis and I have been close friends since then, 2007, I think. So, thanks Wikispaces for helping me become a different, and I hope, better teacher for my students. Simply, thanks! 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? I think it would say: "Hey, guy, I fancy you. We’re the perfect couple, like the bow and the arrow." And here is A. Juan’s story in Spanish. (Y aquí está la historia de A. Juan en español:) 1. Describes brevemente tu grupo, tu wiki, y cómo la utilizas: Se trata de una plataforma online en la que nuestros alumnos de Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria tienen ubicados sus portfolios y en la que participan distintas áreas del currículo, tanto áreas lingüísticas comono lingüísticas. A modo de Portfolio de las Lenguas, está dividido en tres grandes secciones o partes de un portolio: Pasaporte, Biografía, Dossier. Tanto el alumnado como el profesorado del centro utiliza esta wiki de manera cotidiana durante el periodo escolar para subir todo tipo de documentación referida al proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Además tenemos otras cuatro secciones que complementan el trabajo que realizamos en el portfolio y que son las siguientes: Aprendiendo sobre el PEL: En este espacio damos a conocer cómo los alumnos comienzan a conocer lo que es el PORTFOLIO EUROPEO DE LAS LENGUAS y sus partes. Herramientas Web 2.0: Nos parece interesante el hecho de trabajar con herramientas web 2.0 en el plano educativo y prueba de ello es este proyecto de elaboración de portfolios electrónicos de nuestro alumnado. Nuestra idea es la de seguir incorporando nuevas y atractivas herramientas que mejoren y faciliten el aprendizaje de nuestro alumnado. Unidades Didácticas Integradas: Nuestro departamentode inglés, y durante el curso escolar llevamos a cabo distintas unidades didácticas integradas en coordinación y colaboración con otros departamentos. Hasta la fecha hemos llevado a cabo unidades con los departamentos de Ciencias Sociales, Plástica,Tecnología, Matemáticas, Portugués y Lengua Española. Nuestra intención es seguir contando con la colaboración de otros departamentos y extender esta práctica a todo el centro. Actividades PEL: En esta página damos a conocer información relacionada con actividades tipo PEL. Para ello proponemos el siguiente enlace en el que la Junta de Andalucía ha elaborado una serie de actividades muy interesantes para poder ser llevadas a cabo en el aula de inglés, francés o alemán, y que aparecen concretadas atendiendo a los distintos niveles de aprendizaje dentro del MCERL (Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las Lenguas). 2. Además el botón Editar, ¿cuál herramienta wiki es tu favorita? El botón WIDGET. 3.¿Cuál es una forma en que estás usando wikis y otras herramientas web 2.0 en tus proyectos? En cuanto a la docencia directa en el aula, tengo elaborado una serie de wikis que aporta al alumnado motivación e interés de cara a un aprendizaje significativo y real: https://iescristodelrosario-ingles-eso.wikispaces.com/ y https://iescristodelrosario-ingles-bach.wikispaces.com/: Wikis para mis alumnos en Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato. En ambas se pueden encontrar cuadernos online del alumnado con sus trabajos personales, documentos de autoevaluación y coevaluación, actividades online de gramática y vocabulario, proyectos y/o tareas individuales y grupales, actividades relacionados con las cuatro destrezas básicas, canciones, videos, etc. https://myenglishproject.wikispaces.com/: Un Proyecto Aprendizaje de inglés y por el que recibí en 2009 el E-LEARNING AWARDS: Young Digital Planet silver award for "Foreign language learning through ICT". http://eportfoliosecundaria.wikispaces.com/: Es un proyecto en el que se muestra un nuevo método de enseñanza del inglés en secundaria basado en los intereses del propio alumnado. Hay una gran cantidad de material, tanto para el alumno como para el profesor. https://docentesenextremadura.wikispaces.com/- En esta wiki, me dedico a impartir cursos a profesores, tanto en inglés conmo en español, relacionados con el aprendizaje del inglés y las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación. https://zafra543.wikispaces.com/ - mi wiki personal https://iescristodelrosario.wikispaces.com - Wiki de mi centro de trabajo donde puede encontrar informacíon sobre la escuela y enlaces de wikis de los profesores. https://myenglishproject.wikispaces.com/Aplicaciones+Web+2.0+para+profesores+de+ingl%C3%A9s - Utilizando siempre los wikis como portales de referencia, enseño a mis alumnos el uso y el manejo de otras herramientas web 2.0. 4. Cuéntanos un momento particular cuando dices "¡Ajá! Es por eso que uso wikis!" Como podéis ver soy un apasionado o fanático del uso de las wikis. Me encontré con los wikis un día cualquiera de un verano cualquiera, aburrido, agarré una revista de ordenadores y en una página cualquiera que abrí por casualidad …, sí, allí estaba. La palabra wiki, wikispaces; yo no tenía muy claro de lo que se trataba. Tomé papel y bolígrafo, y anoté que eso que estaba delante de mis ojos me podría servir para mis clases. Ahora no sólo las utilizo en el plano educativo pero también en mi vida personal con wikis para mi Banda de Música, Asociación de Lactancia Materna, Asociación Deportiva, y también para los antiguos alumnos de mi instituto. Y así fue, desde ese verano de 2007 hasta hoy día. Le doy las gracias a Wikispaces por todo lo que me ha aportado en mi trabajo diario y por lo que seguirá significando en mi labor docente futura. Simplemente, gracias. 5. Si podía pedirlo, qué crees que tu wiki diría de ti? Creo que diría: "Chico, me gustas. Somos la pareja perfecta."

Amie Weldy is an Instructional Technology Specialist from Forsyth County, Georgia whom we’ve enjoyed learning from on Twitter! We’re pleased to feature her and her creative classroom practice as a guest blogger this week. Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas with Amie here: Twitter: @AmieWeldy Website: myhotspot-amie.blogspot.com   Last year, I decided I wanted to try "flipping the classroom" with my 7th and 8th graders. I had heard about it, but I was a little intimidated by the idea. Flipping the classroom by definition is having students learn the content at home and when they come to class they complete a performance task or project based assignment where they apply what they learned at home. In my opinion, the teacher facilitates learning and helps students during the application process by moving around the classroom and giving feedback on the product as it is being created. It was scary letting go of the reins of being in front of the class and letting the students be in charge of their learning. It is an untraditional approach, but their engagement and they products they created were absolutely worth it! I had used Wikispaces previously as a website for information in my college cohort, so I thought it would be a great idea to use it in the classroom as a collaborative space for students and myself. The first wiki I did with my students was our Roller Coaster Project for 8th graders who were taking an advanced 9th grade physical science class and were learning about forces and motion. Students worked in groups of 3-4 to construct and label a roller coaster. We used Wikispaces as a collaborative area for the teacher to extend the classroom to home. The wiki housed all of our flipped classroom assignments and resources. With this first wiki, students learned how to access information on the Wikispaces page. After I showed them the first time and told them that I expected from them, I was hands-off. They would come in every day and have a short quiz on an instant response website and then would get started on building their roller coaster. They knew that when they walked in the door, they were to take the quiz and start building. A big reason I used Wikispaces was to engage students in their own learning. Every project they did where we used Wikispaces, the students were involved in the process of learning and were taking ownership of it. As the year went on, our classroom Wikispaces usage evolved into students creating and collaborating even more on the site. After the initial roller coaster project, I had students edit their own pages and collaborate with their group members through pages on the site. Instead of going to a website to read and take notes, they went to the site and added their part. They were responsible for a part in a greater whole; the engagement with them knowing this was astounding! The first time I used Wikispaces with students, I had to create accounts for around 90 6th graders. It took a lot of time on my part to make all of those accounts, get the information to the students, make account permission strict, and so forth. It was definitely doable, it just took a bit more time to get it started. The next year, our county purchased a Wikispaces Campus license and moved our wikis over to our own site. This was so much easier because our students already have a username and password they use for everything else and with the Campus site we were able to link their school usernames and passwords to Wikispaces. This cut down significantly on the initial prep I had to do. I could instead focus on making the site more collaborative and good looking! I have thoroughly enjoyed using Wikispaces in the classroom. It is one of the most powerful collaborative tools I have ever found. I am presenting at the upcoming Georgia Educational Technology Conference; my session, "Flip it! Using Wikispaces to Engage Learns and Extend the Classroom," will be on Thursday, November 7th from 3:15- 4:15. Please stop by if you are there! Amie will be joining us as a special guest panelist at an upcoming Flip Your Classroom with Wikispaces Hangout on Air in November. Stay tuned to learn more!  Want to see more of Amie’s examples of flipped teaching with Wikispaces? Check out two more of her projects here: Ecology project: 7th grade students used Wikispaces to find nightly assignments for their ticket-in-the-door the next day. They created a mockumentary or a website describing a specific biome and uploaded it or linked it on the wiki. They then taught the class about that biome while the audience gave positive feedback to them through a backchannel conversation using Socrative.  Biodiversity project: 7th grade students had to work together to describe issues in our biosphere. They were assigned specific QR codes on a cube. Each person was responsible for their own research, which they put onto their group Wikispaces page. Next, they had to collaborate on creating a presentation to show the class which they embedded and linked into Wikispaces.

Math teachers rejoice: one of your favorite online tools now comes embedded right in your Wikispaces page! We’re very pleased to announce a new Widget available in the Education Gallery: GeoGebra. GeoGebra is a free, multi-platform online tool that allows students to visualize mathematical concepts. Now you can integrate GeoGebraTube materials directly into your wiki! GeoGebraTube is a repository of dynamic mathematics teaching and learning materials created and shared by GeoGebra users. Teachers and students search this database to view, download, revise, create and share worksheets with others. To embed one of these resources in your wiki, go to "Edit" and "Widget" on any of your wiki pages and choose "Education" the "Geogebra" to find pages and pages of interactive student "worksheets" that embed beautifully on your wiki. Amazingly, GeoGebraTube averages 100 new pieces of material every day and has had 22 million visitors since its launch 18 months ago, with some applets receiving more than 100,000 views, exemplified by a Hong Kong based user with 129,000+ views for a worksheet on area of circles. Want to give it a try? Open up your Math project page or assignment page and add a GeoGebra widget, like "Dissecting a Quadrilateral," press "Save," and start clicking away. If you press the Gear to the right of the widget before inserting, you can control its size, labeling and other customizations. You can even preview before embedding. The GeoGebra Education widget joins a growing list of interactive widgets you can embed into you wiki. Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter which is your favorite, and stay tuned for more!

We’re excited to announce Quizlet as the newest addition to our Education Widget gallery. Quizlet is the #3 app in the Education section of the app store, and there’s definitely a reason why. It’s simple, sleek, and lets you turn what you’re learning in the classroom into fun study materials, quizzes, and games. You can also browse a large selection of material already developed by fellow educators and students and incorporate that into your learning. To embed any or all of your Quizlet learning sets into your wiki, edit your wiki page and go to the "Widget" tool. In the "Education" category, go to "Quizlet." From there you can either log into your Quizlet account to pull up your material or search across peer-generated content in your subject or interest area. Once you’ve chosen your set, you can embed it in one of four study modes: Scatter - Match words to their definitions. Beat your own time or race against your friends. Learn - Answer the questions, track your progress, and review the things you got wrong. Flashcards - The tried and true, this time in digital format. Speller - Type in what you hear. It works in 18 different languages. Save your embed, save the page, and let the fun begin. If you haven’t yet tried Quizlet, do. We think you’ll love it. In fact, if we weren’t busy working on Wikispaces, we might spend all day using Quizlet to quiz each other on our old high school geography.

Part of the fun of engaging with users on the phone, via email, and on social networking sites like Twitter every week is hearing about all of the interesting new ideas happening in the educational technology world. This week, we’ve gathered some inspiring stories and resources from across the web to share with you! 1. #caedchat A regional offshoot of the popular #edchat Twitter chats, last week’s was an inspiring feed. We particularly enjoyed seeing question 7, posed by @hollyclark, about favorite tools for global collaboration: "How do you make connections with other classrooms beyond your school/district in order to collaborate? #caedchat." Folks shared their sources for making connections, including Twitter, Skype in the Classroom, wikis, and more! We’ve loved interacting with #globaled users like Michael Graffin and elementary school teacher in Long Island Lisa Parisi- Lisa has a #globaled wiki project in motion right now, "Using Data to Make Sense of the World." You can join the collaborative project now right in the wiki by adding your classroom information. Read the feed for more excellent ideas like these from #caedchat and participate next week if you’re a Californian educator! Tweets about "#caedchat" 2. CUE Conference The annual fall conference from Computer Using Educators (CUE) happened last weekend in Napa, California; check out the schedule for great ideas and sign up now for the spring conference in Palm Springs, California. Are you presenting at upcoming regional conferences, like last week’s guest blogger Amie Weldy‘s Wikispaces presentation at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference? Let us know on Twitter @wikispaces or in the comments below if so! 3. Online Lesson Sharing Sites Last week, the Huffington Post shared an article about lesson-sharing sites and how the National Education Association (NEA) is joining the fun with an online lesson challenge. It’s interesting to see the bevy of sites become available for teachers to find resources such as Share My Lesson and BetterLesson.  How are your school’s teachers sharing great lessons with one another? We’ve been excited to see many of our teachers use wikis as a homebase to post and share lessons and resources with each other. Last week, our team got to hear from Kathleen Buckley of Brockton Public Schools in Massachusetts- their Bilingual Education Department banded together to create a wiki to quickly and easily learn from each other and create an online home base for the team. 4. Build Up Your Math Toolkit Edutopia had a great post this week sharing 11 virtual math tools for the classroom, replacing some of those large, space-taking manipulatives with digital versions. With Wikispaces, you can integrate any tool that has an embed option and we’re excited to share our new GeoGebra widget this week as well! Read last week’s blog about it and embed it in your wiki today under "Widgets."

Our Projects feature is designed to let teachers easily create member teams in their wiki. However, it’s flexible enough to be used to create Student Workspaces as well. With a personal workspace, your students can: Submit assignments privately Work on their own project, at their own pace Receive personal feedback from their teacher Keep a record of their progress Creating Student Workspaces is easy. You can use a spreadsheet to create a list of members and team names, and then assign members to their personal space: Go to your wiki’s Members page. At the bottom of the Members list, you’ll find a download button that allows you to download your Members spreadsheet: After saving the spreadsheet, open it on your computer. Remove the Members and Type columns, as well as any organizers that show up on the list. Remove the "Name" header on Column A. Copy all usernames to column B, making sure your copied names (i.e. the Project Team names) align with their respective usernames. The result should look like this: Save your spreadsheet as a CSV file and navigate to your wiki’s Projects page by clicking on the Projects icon at the top of any page. Click on Create Project and assign a name to your new project (e.g. "Student Workspace"). Next, click on Add Teams, select "Upload a spreadsheet with usernames and team names", click on "Browse" and choose the username CSV file you’ve created. Make sure all Team permissions are set to Private, to make sure only organizers have access to these personal spaces, as well as the members assigned to their respective spaces. That’s it! You should now have a Student Workspace Project, with each student listed in their respective Team box: Once your Project is ready, students will find a link to their personal space directly on your wiki’s Navigation Bar:

Denise Krebs and Gallit Zvi started the geniushour wiki in March of 2012. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: We are a collaborative group of teachers dedicated to Genius Hour. Genius Hour is a movement in education that allows students to plan their own inquiry projects based on their own passions and wonders. Genius, as Seth Godin describes it, is "the act of solving a problem in a way no one has solved it before. It has nothing to do with winning a Nobel prize in physics or certain levels of schooling. It’s about using human insight and initiative to find original solutions that matter." When students choose their own problems to solve in genius hour, school becomes a wonderful place of learning and growing, a place to be creative and productive and do work that matters. We all know students do not become deeply, personally invested in worksheets, but they do in genius hour. We use our wiki, geniushour.wikispaces.com to share resources, documents and blog links. Another important aspect of our wiki is the chat archive page. On the first Thursday of each month, educators from around the world get on twitter and, using the hashtag #GeniusHour, we have a discussion about how we are implementing Genius Hour in our classrooms, and other related topics. For more information about Genius Hour, read the "Genius Hour Manifesto"! 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? The "recent changes" is a wonderful option! Because there is a group of us editing the site regularly, it is nice to see what changes have been recently made (rather than having to scroll through each page and try to discover them)! 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? Part of genius hour is having students share their learning with their classroom peers, as well as a global audience. Students use wikis, blogs, Voki, Prezi, Glogster, Powtoon, Voicethread, iMovie, video editing software and YouTube, and many other tools to publish their work. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" We chose to use Wikispaces from the beginning because we wanted this to be a collaborative, interactive site. As a result, there are so many teachers and classrooms doing genius hour around the world now! We want the community to add to and edit this resource. Wikispaces makes it easy for many people to be involved in the wiki. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? We think our wiki would say that we are educators who are passionate about student choice and 21st century learning! And that we are inclusive; let us know if you would like to contribute!

Holiday Movie Marathon Mash-Up Mix up your Netflix queue of holiday classics with recordings from last month’s Global Education Conference, all in one place for your viewing pleasure. And with global wiki projects to join like this one, we’re certain you’ll walk away with a few great ideas for the New Year. Still need more? Take a peek at the #nyscate feed from the annual New York State Association for Computers and Technologies in Education Conference, and let us know any other great conference feeds to check out this month! Tweets about "#nyscate" Need something live to watch and participate in? Join tonight’s interactive EduTech Smackdown, Dec. 2nd at 8pm Eastern. Buy One Get One Free Google Glass Got your attention! We kid, of course, and while you may itching for a Cyber Monday deal on this piece of tech,  we were  simply excited to read Wikispaces power-user Margaret Powers explain how she’s used the wearable computing device in her classroom. Is there a new gadget you’re interested in experimenting with in the new year with your students? The Glass Explorer program looks to be taking more inquiries of interest-more information here if you want to try out what Margaret’s doing at her school. Hour of Code You’d be amazed to watch the engineers at the Wikispaces office do their thing, and we’re always excited to see opportunities arise for more students to learn the magic of programming themselves. In honor of Computer Science Education Week, educators are invited to host an Hour of Code in their classrooms during the week of Dec. 9th through 15th. Join the fun here, and let us know how you use wikis to share coding with your students! Just a quick gander at the list of ten fastest growing jobs in the past five years will be reason enough to get your students involved. We hope you’ll check out our Wikispaces Classroom online community for more- free to join, and share any Cyber Monday EdTech goodies you found! Events, gadgets, or just good ideas welcome :) 

Meet Tim King, Head of Computer Studies at Centre Wellington DHS in Fergus, Ontario, Canada. He recently discussed how he is using Wikispaces Classroom for sharing notes with his high school students on his blog, and it was so awesome that we invited him here to  show  other educators how to get going with a similar space for their own class. It all begins on TEJ101morning, his Grade 9 Introduction to Computer Technology Survey course wiki, where he has created a Wikispaces Classroom environment for his students. (Wikispaces Classroom is our newest type of wiki that has extra goodies just for teachers, including a Newsfeed and an Assessment tool. If you already have a wiki, you can turn on the Classroom features by going to Settings->General page and choose "Classroom." You’ll notice you now have a few extra features along the top, including the Assessment tool Tim highlighted. Feel free to check out our tutorial here to learn more.) As a former English teacher, Tim was interested in helping improve the note-taking process with his students. To that end, he had each student pick a chapter of content from their eBook and create a separate wiki page for the portion they were responsible for. On each page, students typed their notes, inserted links, pictures and video while other  students read and edited each other’s. He noticed they were much more engaged in this note-taking process because they were sharing their notes with a  real audience.  During this course, he happened upon our Assessment tool. A picture from Tim King’s blog, http://ugdsbpd.blogspot.ca, showcasing his use of the Wikispaces Classroom Assessment tool. The Assessment tool displays a list of all students in the course and shows their activity on the site in real-time, including when they are reading a page, editing content and everytime a page is saved. He showed it to his students and projected it on his screen during class to give his students instant feedback, which the students promptly got excited about, pushing themselves even further. At the end of this project, Tim noted that  his students’ actual grades improved. Enough of us, Tim shows it so much better! Want to see a step-by-step guide to building this kind of resource? Check out our 15-minute ride through getting the Assessment feature up and running for your students. And a quick tour of the tool is below. If you want to join us for an interactive, hands-on experience with the Assessment tool,  please join us for our 90-minute online course on using Wikispaces Classroom this week. Make and Take: Wikispaces Classroom Online Course 90 minutes of hands-on exploration of a Wikispaces Classroom site. Learn how to interact with the Newsfeed, create Projects, and track student progress with Assessments. A longer session means more time to play, and you’ll even earn a Certificate of Completion afterwards! Time: Wednesday, Dec 18th, 7pm Pacific Standard Time (Thursday, Dec. 19th, 2pm Sydney time) Click here to find out what time it will be for you! Register Here

Jessica Sullivan teaches high school Biology and serves as Science Department Head at Escuela Campo Alegre, the American International school of Caracas, Venezuela. Escuela Campo Alegre is a small (600 students) Pre-K through 12th grade English language international school primarily serving the children of expatriate families working for diplomatic agencies and international corporations. The students at Escuela Campo Alegre (ECA) come from 40 different countries and the teaching faculty represents 12 different nationalities. ECA is a one-to-one laptop school for grades 6-12, employs three full time curriculum technology integration specialists, and provides ongoing support and training in technology for the faculty. It also utilizes Wikispaces Campus service, a school-wide wiki solution providing wikis and accounts for teachers and students. Jessica has presented her work on designing course websites to international teachers in Venezuela and Argentina. In March she heads to Sao Paulo, Brazil for the Association of American Schools in South America to present Twitter Basics for Teachers: Using Twitter to Engage Students and Build Class Community. Follow Jessica on Twitter https://twitter.com/sullyteachbio! Hello from Caracas, Venezuela! I teach International Baccalaureate Biology at Escuela Campo Alegre to a diverse group of students from around the world. ECA uses Wikispaces as our web platform to communicate with students and parents as well as our virtual learning portal during both planned and unexpected school closures. I began using Wikispaces in October of 2010 during my first year at ECA. Teachers at ECA had previously been expected to have a website for their courses, but there was not a common webhosting service or format required. As part of our transition to a more unified digital front and in preparation for anticipated school closures, we all moved to Wikispaces Campus during the fall semester of 2010. I wanted to create an online space that was an effective communication tool with students and parents and a planning and organization system for myself. Through my own trial and error I developed a working infrastructure that supported student learning and made my life as a teacher a bit easier. Below I have outlined key elements of my Wiki organization as a tool for both my students and myself. Effective Use of Homepage Prime Real Estate Like many teachers, I didn’t know what to do with the white space in the center of my newly assigned wiki. I tried several different things at first and ended up going with the most important content (links to course unit pages) and the most engaging widget (embedded our Twitter newsfeed). Your homepage should engage your students and lead them right to the most important content - which for me is their class work and homework for the day. Appropriate Use of Side Navigation Bar I list links that students may need to access from any page on the wiki on the side navigation bar. These include links to General Resources, IB Biology Exam Preparation, and Advisory Information. Some teachers may prefer to include course links on the side navigation bar and put multimedia content in the main space of the homepage. That would work too - but for me I have found it easiest for students to navigate to and access content information in the center of the main page. Course Organization by Unit I began organizing my wiki pages by unit for each of my classes to decrease the amount of content on each page. Pages kept getting longer as I kept adding the day’s class work and homework. As I switched to organizing content not only by course but also by unit of study, I realized a few unexpected benefits. The main one was that the unit page became both a record and a template for lesson planning for future semesters. It also became a contextualized hub for bookmarking links, documents and animations. Seeing a list of units on the homepage overwhelmed some students, so just this year I began highlighting the current unit so the students know exactly where to go for their course information. Tables, Tables and More Tables! I found the insert table function to be incredibly valuable in organizing the content of my Wiki. By putting content in rows and columns I made better use of the space available across the wiki page. It is also much easier for students to located content in a table format. In fact, when I began working on my Wiki and before I sharing it with students, I asked my students which teachers had the best Wikis on campus. All of the teachers that the students mentioned had the daily class work and homework organized into a table. Now I use tables not only for the class work and homework calendar but also for organization of course units, links and IB Biology resources. Favorite Embedded Widgets My favorite widgets are the Google countdown clock and the embedded Twitter feed. I teach IB Biology which culminates in a series of exams for the International Baccalaureate diploma during May of the students’ senior year. I keep a countdown clock on the homepage of the wiki to keep students on their toes and focused on our goal…arriving prepared for the IB Biology exam! The embedded Twitter feed keeps students engaged with the pictures, reminders, announcements and supplemental course links that I post via Twitter. Students are already inundated with social media notifications and updates so having all of my @sullyteachbio content in one place makes sure my tweets get to their intended audience in a timely manner. As with all things in a teaching, wiki design is a work in progress - it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time, it just has to work a little better than what you were doing before. Keep making small improvements as you learn what works and your Wiki will evolve to be a helpful tool for both you and your students. I hope this helps you in your quest to build a wiki that works for you and your students. Drop me a line at jessicas@ecak12.com or @sullyteachbio - let’s keep the conversation going! Learn more about Wikispaces Campus for your school with Eric on our team next month! Register here.

As of July 1, 2014 we will no longer support Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) on Wikispaces. Starting June 1st, visitors to any Wikispaces site using IE 8 will see a warning banner linking to this blog post. We will continue to support Internet Explorer versions 9, 10, and 11 as well as modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you are using IE 8 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. Both Chrome and Firefox now automatically update to the latest versions, so you’ll never be left behind again if you switch. Internet Explorer 8 was released five years ago in March 2009. Microsoft has since released three new major IE versions, with IE 11 launching in late 2013. Given the tiny percentage of visitors who still use IE 8 on Wikispaces, we can’t continue to justify the amount of work that is required to maintain support. We try to be very conservative in ending browser support to minimize impact on those who cannot switch, especially on Windows. Here we believe we’re in good company. Google Apps, for example, dropped support for IE 8 in late 2012! If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@wikispaces.com.

We are thrilled to announce that Wikispaces has been acquired by TSL Education. Joining TSL is the perfect opportunity for us to stay true to our principles and dramatically increase our ability to impact the lives of teachers worldwide. Read on for why. First, the most important things you need to know: 1) The entire Wikispaces team is staying on board 2) We are more committed than ever to serving teachers and students 3) We are going to build more ambitious, more revolutionary, and more delightful products for you more quickly than ever before If you don’t know much about our history, have a read of our letter to the Wikispaces community. It talks about how we’ve gotten here and how a human approach to business and a commitment to being part of the education community has been so important to our success. We have always been committed to our principles and to doing the most good we can. When we met the TSL Education team last year, we realized that we had a rare opportunity. We could stay true to our principles, deliver a level of value to our community that we could never deliver alone, and do so at enormous scale extremely quickly. That’s because TSL is run by exceptional people and because combining their assets with ours is going to produce incredible products for the education community. Like us, TSL has a mission that is focused on teachers. "We believe that teachers around the world are the single most important influence on a child’s education and that they need to access the very best content and resources to inspire their students." Very often in the education industry teachers are seen as a means to an end, a stepping stone — or worse — an impediment to getting to the real customer. TSL has built its success on serving teachers. This focus on and commitment to teachers shouldn’t be rare, but it is. TSL has managed to balance a long history of operational and financial success with being a deeply innovative company. Since being founded as The Times Educational Supplement in The Times newspaper in 1902, TSL has accomplished a rare feat several times over: adapting to and evolving with a changing world. In recent times it has been extremely successful migrating its teacher recruitment business from print to digital and at the same time has built the largest online network of teachers in the world. And that network isn’t just noise. Teachers download over 20 million pieces of teacher-built lesson content on TSL’s platform every month. We’ve had a chance to take a close look from the inside and it’s just a remarkable community doing great work at large scale. What we are going to do with the combination of a large and vibrant teacher generated library of teaching resources and our classroom collaboration platform is going to be groundbreaking. Those of you who know our Wikispaces Classroom platform deeply will be able to divine some of the genuinely exciting things we’re going to build for teachers. And being backed by a group of smart, committed people, who have significant resources and a strong belief in our team and approach means that we’ll be able to move far more quickly than we ever have before. Some of you may be skeptical, thinking that this acquisition may affect our ability to continue to serve teachers as we always have, or that it might change our focus so that we can no longer be the partners to the education community we have prided ourselves on being. To those concerns all we can say is "watch what happens." In the next months you’re going to see an even more focused Wikispaces team, an even better Wikispaces Classroom experience, and a whole lot of good stuff that we could never have built for you without a partner like TSL. Those of you who know us know how passionate we are about the company we’ve built and the relationship we have with all of you. We are so excited about this next step in our growth and what we’re going to be able to do together. Thank you, sincerely, from everyone in the Wikispaces team, for all of your help. We would not have gotten here without you. And we won’t be able to take this next step without you either. Please continue to be as vocal as you have always been and let us know what you need, what we’re doing well, and what we aren’t. And let’s build great things together. The Wikispaces Team Adam, Dom, Eric, James, Jeff, Max, and Wendy

We are thrilled to announce that Wikispaces has been acquired by TSL Education. A few things won’t change: our entire team in San Francisco will continue to work on the platform you know and love with a true commitment to serving teachers and students. One thing will change: we are now backed by TSL’s deep resources and huge education network (read more about TSL in our acquisition announcement). This means we get to build more ambitious, more revolutionary, and more delightful products for you more quickly than ever before. This day marks a new chapter in the story of our company. While our plans for the future are important, allow us to reflect for a moment on why we started Wikispaces and how we got here. We think it’s the best way for you to understand why this is going to be great for the education community. We set out in 2005 on a journey to build a company that was different from many other Silicon Valley startups. We didn’t raise venture capital. We didn’t have a splashy product launch. We didn’t chase trends. We never issued a press release. Instead, we focused on positively impacting the lives of as many real people as possible. We strove to build a company with a human voice. We answered your emails and phone calls ourselves, day in and day out, to understand your needs. We built a company that was comfortable playing the long game, where success is measured by building a sustainable business making real change through technology. Early on as we were learning who we were as a young company and product, we were surprised to discover that our most excited and engaged audience was teachers, students, librarians, parents, education technologists. We tugged on that thread, and it’s been the source of nearly all of our success ever since. Through relentless iteration we grew to serve the needs of millions of registered users, and tens of millions of monthly visitors. All along we found our strength from you. From the feedback — both good and bad! — you sent us via email, on Twitter, in person at conferences. From the hundreds of millions of edits, uploads, and messages you’ve put on your wikis. We are in awe of how you’ve used technology inside and outside the classroom to make your lives and your students’ lives better, across every grade level, country, and subject matter imaginable. We are extremely lucky to have found a partner as good as TSL Education. TSL is laser-focused on improving the lives of teachers around the world. In talking to Louise and her team we were excited by the similarity in our missions. And TSL has assets that we could only dream of as a small company: financial strength, an amazing and engaged community of teachers, and a broad library of educational resources. The natural question you may be thinking is: what happens next? We will redouble our efforts to bring simple, usable, joyful technology into classrooms around the world. Our team in San Francisco will grow both in size and in ambition: we’re out to change the world of education as part of the TSL team. And we’re building applications on top of the Wikispaces platform that will surprise and delight teachers and students alike. We think you’ll love what you see. We know that some of you will view this announcement with a feeling of trepidation. Many technology acquisitions don’t play out as planned. We ask you to judge this acquisition by our actions over the coming days and weeks and months. We’re the same team today that we were yesterday, now with a supercharged mission to better the lives of teachers and their students. We can’t wait to take the next step in this journey with you. Keep an eye out here on our blog and on Twitter for a preview of what’s coming next. Tell a friend. Start that second or third or twentieth wiki for your classroom — we’re here to stay. And, as always, drop us a line at help@wikispaces.com. We’d love to hear from you. The Wikispaces Team Adam, Dom, Eric, James, Jeff, Max, and Wendy

Garth Holman is a Middle School Social Studies teacher in Northeast Ohio and an University of Akron Professor. He and colleague Mike Pennington share ideas on at teachersfortomorrow.net on implementing 21st century skills: collaboration, risk-taking, and reflection. Follow Garth at @garthholman on Twitter and Mike at @professormike1 to continue the conversation.   Garth Holman teaches in Beachwood City Schools outside of Cleveland, Ohio while his partner in crime, Mike Pennington, teaches about 45 miles away. His goal is for all of his students to publish their work to the web, and his Digital Textbook , which he started 8 years ago, strives to do just that. 1,600 students at 2 schools working together to create a living, student-created textbook! How Do Kids Build Legacy and the Capacity to Do Great Things? Garth shares his digital textbook on Wikispaces, which he describes as a "kid’s playground," and further explains that, "through the democratization of everyone involved, we come up with the best possible answers we can get" and you can tell that by the rich media embedded in the wiki. If you want to read more about digital textbooks and the students who create them, you can check out Alan November’s "Who Owns the Learning," and "The Global School" created by Ohio’s own, William Kist. How can you get started? Garth and his students began by simply discussing the standards and the topics they were required to address by the end of the year. The first iteration was just text but soon enough the class began to brainstorm about how to make the experience more interactive. Students began adding new kinds of media to round out their digital textbooks. Pages not only contained text and images that you mind find in a regular textbook, but also YouTube videos, ThingLinks, and other interactive media elements embedded right into the wiki. Students kept a digital record of what they edited, and the Mr. Holman, was also able to view the History of any page to see its transformation over time. All of the images are Creative Commons and the text is kid-created in kid languages, for kids! Amazingly, students would even jump online during the summer simply because they were interested in seeing what was new. Nothing has been graded on this Digital Textbook- it’s all for the intrinsic motivation of having a real audience view their work. As he quotes Dan Pink, "We’re preparing our kids for the future and not the past." The ultimate goal? Garth says it is to make an identical copy of the book from the European perspective from a European school and showcase the different perspectives- Americans learning about European history vs. those walking by castles every day! Wiki tips for your own textbook The potential for new projects is just amazing- students can make music video parodies inspired by History Teacher Amy Burvall from Hawaii,Skype with an actual historian about the Decameron, share an original political cartoon, or create embeddable Thinglinks and truly build all of the content themselves. Anything you can create on the internet can be embedded or tied into your Wikispaces digital textbook, and the content your students create and curate may surprise you. Garth also has a unique and easy way of adding students to the textbook- before he sets the wiki’s permissions to Protected (public viewing rights, but only Members can make edits) he holds an "open enrollment" period at the beginning of class where he actually takes Membership requests so that his students can quickly add themselves. Then he switches off this option, but turning it on again if he gets new students during the year. We loved this idea for taking your wiki from a place where you put content as a teacher to a place where students are contributing.   Check out more of Garth sharing this work along with our other Educator Bloggers Jessica Sullivan and Timothy King from last week’s Google Plus Hangout on Air Panel: Rockstars of the Digital Classroom! Stay tuned for more panels and webinars at wikiwebinars.wikispaces.com. 

You may have heard that we’ve recently joined forces with education powerhouse TSL Education. This is great news on many fronts. For one, it means that we’ll be expanding our team in South of Market in San Francisco, California! There are a lot of reasons you might want to join us, not just because of the fabulous array of lunchtime eateries within walking distance of our HQ. Have a listen to Eric, for instance, our Account Manager who has been with Wikispaces for 4 years. "I have the opportunity to work with an intelligent team of well-rounded, genuine people who bring a sense of purpose and humor to the office," he notes. "While I get clear guidance from the team, every original idea is welcomed with honest advice and support. Interacting with our users, I get a real sense pride from learning about the impact our work has had on teachers, students and the larger educational community." Eric is our first point of contact on the phone and email for our Wikispaces Campus members and he helps them design the experience they need for success at their school. If you join our team as our Operations Manager, you’ll have all sorts of opportunities to work with Eric and the rest of our team. You’ll get to help manage our vendor relationships, run our recruiting program, manage our employee benefits programs, handle incoming payments from our customers, arrange meals and travel, handle our (simple) accounting, manage and update basic financial reports, and generally be responsible for our team being happy and productive. It’s an amazing opportunity to help shape the way our company grows. Wikispaces has been evolving in so many exciting ways over the years, thanks in no small part to our talented team of software engineers, and now we are looking for new members to help push the platform even further. Our partnership with TSL will bring resources and a demand for all kinds of creativity. So if fun challenges are your kind of thing, you may consider becoming one of our Software Engineers. If you join the team, you’ll be designing and building new pieces of the application, working on our front-end javascript and AJAX, squeezing a few more requests/second out of our web heads, and working on our replicated databases and file storage. We’re also looking for a DevOps Engineer to help manage and scale our cloud-hosted infrastructure. Candidates must have a love for automating the things they do today so they can do more interesting things tomorrow and of course they’ll get to work with a pretty fantastic team. Maybe you’re more into User Interface design? Perfect. Come join our team as our UI/UX Designer and realize your vision in HTML and CSS. You’ll own our interface and will make your mark on a site with over 35 million monthly visitors and thousands of customers. Max leads our Support efforts, and really enjoys "working in an environment that understands the value of teachers, and actively works on providing teachers with tools that make teaching more efficient and engaging." Everything you do in Operations, Software Engineering, DevOps or UI/UX will revolve around that principle, and maybe Max will even teach you some of his krav maga moves. If you’re lucky. Read about all of these jobs in detail at wikispaces.com/jobs and send us your CV right away if you’re talented, a great team member, and you feel like we’d be a good fit for you.

"If I could kiss @wikispaces right now, I would! Have you looked at your wikis on an iPad today?" We were excited to read @RhondaLuetje‘s response on Twitter and hope you feel the same! Our team knows how important it is to access their content from a variety of devices, and our most recent update has a few features that will change your mobile experience for the better. 1. Responsive Sizing Websites sometimes look different depending on the device you’re using, and we want to make sure Wikispaces looks just as good no matter what you’re using. Now you should see much cleaner navigation with some awesome responsive sizing elements. For instance, you won’t see horizontal scrollbars on your phone and tablets while still maintaining a nice juicy large screen experience to your desktop browsers. 2. Improved Pop-Ups Pop-up screens come up for a variety of reasons in your web world, and sometimes they can act a little funky on mobile devices. Now, with Wikispaces, they should act a bit more behaved for you on the small screen. Menus should appear and take up the entire screen, making it much easier to read, scroll, and make the customizations you need. Pop-ups now take up the entire screen. 3. Larger Button Targets Sometimes, when we use our fingers on our mobile devices, we feel like we’re mashing the screen with huge unwieldy mitts that never get those pesky buttons to do what we want them to do. To help with this phenomenon, our engineers have made buttons larger so they can be more easily clicked with your finger. On the navigational menu, you’ll notice all of your buttons on the side and easier to press. Sadly, they still won’t work if your fingers are in a glove or covered in Cheeto dust, but we’re working on it. Now larger buttons for your navigation menu!   4. Top Navigation We’re nothing without our navigation - in fact, we’d be lost without it (nyuk nyuk). Now everyone gets a top navigational bar on even the smallest screens that incorporates menu items in one place. This saves precious screen space and lets you easily access all of the controls you need. Let us know what you think at @wikispaces or help@wikispaces.com because we’re always striving to improve your experience.

Wikispaces has grown! Today we are excited to welcome to the team Justin Francesconi, our new DevOps Engineer, and Erin Connery, our new Operations Manager. Both started in the past few weeks and we’re very excited to have them! Justin is a talented engineer who will be optimizing and supporting the infrastructure that Wikispaces runs on. Previously Justin worked at Eventbrite and before that TubeMogul. Outside work, Justin is a passionate chef. Every so often he donates his time as the stand in chef at a favorite local restaurant. Welcome, Justin! Justin whipping up a pizza Erin comes to us from The Hatchery, a coworking space for startups he helped launch in San Francisco. Before that, Erin worked in a corporate social responsibility organization. He has worked at several startups over the past five years and really enjoys optimizing teams. In his free time he is usually outdoors, either climbing on rocks or running up mountains. He swears he is smiling in the picture below. Erin smiling as he climbs some rocks. Our team will continue to grow in May. We’re still on the search for fantastic software engineers to build and scale our quickly growing education technology platform. Please refer to our website http://www.wikispaces.com/jobs for more information.  

As the end of the school year draws near for many parts of the world, many educators are taking the time (if they can find it!) to reflect. We hope you can find the time to think about what you have learned this year and hope to build into your professional development (PD) and learning in the coming school year. Justin Ellsworth took this type of reflection to the next level, making it the focus of his own academic student from 2009 to 2011, and recently published the results below.  Justin, a former high school science teacher, is now an instructional technology coordinator at Farmington Public Schools in Michigan, where he focuses on the integration of technology in teaching and learning. From 2009 to 2011, he researched how to best design technology training practices and measured their effects on teacher learning. His study finds that "participation in PD that is sustained, student-centered, participatory, and supported by adequate resources can have a significant impact on teacher learning and practice about specific technologies." Based on our experiences with students and teachers over the past decade, we strongly agree with Justin, and hope you enjoy reading more about his methodology below. Originally shared in the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) Journal of Research on Technology on Education (JRTE) in 2012, we are thrilled to have permission from ISTE to share it here on our blog for wiki users to integrate excellent training in their schools and districts. Give it a read and let us know what you think and any questions you have for Justin! Feel free to share with us on Twitter @wikispaces or with the hashtag #wikipd. You can also join our ongoing TodaysMeet board and post down your question or connection here. Some guiding questions for reading the research: 1) What are you currently doing for teacher training and professional development in technology at your school? 2) What ideas do you have to enhance it for the coming school year? 3) As a wiki user, which skills do you feel are most important to help teachers and students learn? 4) What is one quote that really resonated with you? Join Justin and Wikispaces on Thursday, June 5th, at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern. Register here and get ready to be inspired!

Ray Mirshahi teaches at Timberbank Junior Public School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is a regular Twitter contributor to the educational community. He teaches ICT / Media Literacy in the morning to the whole school and Grade 3 in the afternoon, and we were so thrilled to be able to sneak a few minutes of his time recently to hear all about how he has used Wikispaces Classroom. Ray uses this education-specific version of Wikispaces.com to design an engaging learning environment for students, and manages several different wikis as the ICT and Media Literacy coordinator. One worth a deep dive is his teaching resource site. He also has a separate wiki for his school, and for his class, where he shares short and long term curricular plans. Finally, he has a wiki for his students where students post work, share feedback, and are assessed by Ray. By creating separate wikis, Ray allows himself to differentiate the content and permission levels he’d like for different audiences. We think it’s a great example, and encourage you to give it a go! Remember teachers, you can have unlimited wikis. Take a moment, relax, and watch as Ray walks us through his ‘student wiki’ using Wikispaces Classroom:   Ray has shared more here and be sure to say hello to him on Twitter. Thanks Ray! Setting Up Your Navigation Many teachers use the navigation bar on the right-hand side of their wikis to simply list all of their pages. Ray took it a step further: he edited the navigation bar to include specific links to his different classes, and even for his archived alumni sites. Create alumni links using "edit navigation" in the navigation panel Want to try it? Click "Edit Navigation" at the bottom of the navigation panel- twice!- and then you’ll have access to that whole space in the side panel to customize. Enjoy! Click on "edit navigation page" to customize Personal Spaces for Each Student Ray says, "We use wikis to allow students to collaborate, as well as let their individual voices to come through," and that’s obvious as soon as you see the individual pages he has set up for his students where they can post things that interest them. Ray adds: "Students need their own safe social media spaces where they can work and play, and Wikispaces in my opinion is the best platform for that." To set this personal space up Ray created a new Project and then created a page for each student. This makes it easy for him to check on students’ work quickly and give them feedback. It’s so easy to do, the principal even comes in and leaves comments, which naturally is super-exciting for students. One Project, Small Group of Students This is a great example of managing small groups of students working together in your class. In this case, Ray creates Projects and then only adds two or three students to it. He has a collaborative page where they can work on things together, such as this awesome "Ghost Ship" story. Then, he creates a page for their own individual work, where they can easily leave each other feedback and ideas. Ray creates Projects and puts several students in each to work together. One Project, All Students As Ray says, "It’s so easy!" He uses a variety of Project formats based on the lesson and needs of each of his classes. In the case below, Ray created a Geometry Project and he uses it as an "extension of the lesson." For instance, he has his students go to the topic they are studying and add to his digital activity, such as identifying vertices on a shape using an animation and having discussions about it, right there on the "lesson page." Create one Project, add all students to it, and you’ve got yourself an interactive lesson space. One Project, All Students, Uploading Files Another use Ray has discovered for the Project space is creating one Project and then simply instructing students to upload their files to that page. This creates a lovely list of files that you can actually comment and give feedback on right there. In this case, for his Audio Jam project, he had students upload their .mp4 files directly to the page and each is able to easily be commented upon. Uploading Files on a Project Page Want to try it? Create ONE Project, and then simply put your instructions on the home page and have the students just "Add File." Then, go to "Pages" and you’ll see them all waiting for you to peruse. Brilliant!

Erin Connery joined the Wikispaces team recently as our Operations Manager. Be sure to tell him hello below and stay tuned for more thoughts from our new team members over the coming months. I studied social innovation at Babson College and much of my education focused on entrepreneurship and social responsibility. After graduating I worked at a corporate social responsibility consultancy for three years. Our team comprised of entrepreneurs and academics and served as one of many parts working to improve the business practices of a multinational corporation (generating multibillion-dollar annual revenue). The power in a large corporate checkbook was exciting to me; we’d tell them how to spend all that money and the world would become a better place! But I soon realized that while the corporate business leaders control a lot of money, and this money can purchase many things (our advice, branding, lobbying power) a large checkbook does not by itself create responsible leadership inside a corporation. Too often "corporate social responsibility" turns into branding and philanthropy. This idea that responsibility wasn’t simply for sale, and couldn’t be purchased, resulted in a more serious lesson: creating a strategy to actually improve responsibility inside a large and complex company required focus that was deliberate and relentless. It required concentrating attention on the target with the power to implement change, which in this case was the managers and leaders inside a company. When trying to figure out how to improve something without a clear definition of success, such as improve "responsibility" or "education" the business has to become much like a classroom. We spent much of the first year in conversation with their corporate team, listening and building personal relationships in order to discover how we might add value, trading role of teacher and student as we collaborated on ideas. This lesson about focus transfers to where I am today, at a company developing a digital classroom. A classroom is, by general definition, "any place where one learns or gains experience." So how do you create "any place"—a digital platform that is customizable for a wide range of users (i.e. K-12 classes)? Improving "education," like improving "responsibility," lacks a clear definition of success, and so requires the same rigorous focus. Unlike corporations, schools and teachers generally have very small budgets. The "education technology" field is full of companies designing technology to make these small budgets stretch farther. But great technology by itself cannot create a great education inside the classroom; it requires teachers. That’s what drew me to Wikispaces; this small company iterated its platform design based on the feedback it received from its users over the course of 10 years. This led to the simple and powerful objective it holds today: to help teachers help students. It seems when the goal is to improve areas as complex and personal as "responsibility" and "education" there is no easy solution. The solution must be created, and we must treat business as a classroom in order to find the focus with which we develop that solution.

I am really excited to have joined Wikispaces as Director of User Experience Design. As a former teacher, I am thrilled to be back in the Ed-Tech world to help teachers communicate and work with their students.I am a product and experience designer from Chile, based out of San Francisco. I come from the Learning, Design & Technology Masters Program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka dschool) at Stanford, where I focused on designing new approaches for cross-generational collaborative communication platforms. My previous work includes communication & storytelling Apps and educational interactive installations. Formerly, I taught interactive design to children of all ages and worked in schools and non-profit organizations to help them create and implement arts-based and design thinking curricula which celebrated a collaborative spirit and incorporated new media technology. My teaching philosophy was about developing a strong creative process towards an interdisciplinary art practice and my teaching style inspired passion for lifelong learning by encouraging my students to incorporate real life experiences in their work.Something that I really care about is to inspire learners of all ages to become design thinkers. Design thinking is a methodology for creative problem solving. You can use it to inform your own teaching practice, or you can teach it to your students as a framework for real-world projects. The design thinking process came out of IDEO and its founder David Kelley and the Institute of design at Stanford. As a style of thinking, Design thinking has come to be defined as combining empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality in analyzing and fitting various solutions to the problem context. The main steps of the process, as describe on    https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/k12/wiki/332ff/Curriculum_Home_Page.html are:   Empathy: Design thinking is a user-centered design process, and the empathy that comes from observing users enables design thinkers to uncover deep and meaningful needs (both overt & latent). Empathy, by definition, is the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another. Define: The Define mode is seen as a ‘narrowing’ part of the process. After collecting volumes of user information, it is time to distill down to one specific user group, their need and the insight behind that need so as to unify and inspire a team. The goal of this mode is to come up with at least one actionable problem statement (often referred to as Point of View (POV)) that focuses on the insights that you uncovered from real users. Ideate: Ideation is the process of idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of "going wide" in terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides the fuel for building prototypes and driving innovative solutions. Prototype: The act of prototyping implies "building", testing, and iterating and is, itself, both a flaring and a narrowing process. The flaring represents the proliferation of low-resolution prototypes developed as different aspects of the prototype are evaluated and the narrowing represents the refinement of the lower resolution models into increasingly complex and resolved models. Test: The test mode is another iterative mode in which we place our low-resolution artifacts in the appropriate context of the user’s life. In regards to a team’s solution, we should always prototype as if we know we’re right, but test as if we know we’re wrong—testing is the chance to refine our solutions and make them better. Learning the design thinking process really impacted my work. I constantly apply the design thinking process in my own work and I like to help others learn the process. I look forward to helping Wikispaces in our mission to help teachers help students and to seeing the amazing work that you all do using our tools. I am excited about how creative and social technologies can be applied to support learning, understanding that each new tool has the potential to radically change the way people learn and teach. I’d love to learn more about the Wikispaces community and the work that you are doing, if you are interested in sharing your experiences please kindly complete this quick survey: http://www.wikispaces.com/t/y/survey201405classroom/.

You asked, and we listened! Announcing the arrival of one of the most requested features of all time, this blog post explains how to use a Join Code to make joining a wiki easier for students.Try it out and let us know what you think!  Step by step directions below. Here’s how to use a Join Code.  Go to Members at the top right of your page. Then you’ll see the Join Code option. Press Create Code. Woo hoo! Now you’ve got yourself a 7-character code that lets other Wikispaces users join your wiki easily. Then, your students can simply go to the address where they will be prompted to log in and automatically become members of that wiki. If the students do not have accounts yet, they can either go to your wiki address, or the Join Code address. They will then be prompted to create an account and also put in your Join Code. Then they will become a member of Wikispaces.com AND of your wiki! If your students already have accounts, they will automatically become a member when they go to the Join Code page address you receive. If your students just go to your wiki address, then they will be prompted to go to the "Join page" to input the code. As a note, the code currently lasts one week and then you’ll need to add it again. You can also disable the code anytime you’d like. It shows up under "Members" as well as on the top of your wiki as long as it’s active. We were excited to see it in practice at ISTE (International Society of Technology in Education) this past month at Vicki Davis’ Wonderful World of Wikis hands-on session! Below, Eric from our team helps moderate the backchannel as dozens of eager educators used the join code to easily gain access to Vicki’s resource site! Let us know how it goes in the comments below. Have you tried the Join Code feature yet? For what class? And how have your students liked it? We look forward to hearing from you!

The good people at the Education Industry Association invited us to give a talk based on our How to Succeed In Ed-Tech article at their EdVentures conference in Newport Beach last week. It was a real pleasure to be able to engage with a group of Ed-Tech entrepreneurs, some of whom were just starting out, to share our history and think about how we can all do a better job building solutions that help teachers and students. I met some really passionate new entrepreneurs working on exactly these questions and came away inspired by the energy they are bringing to their ventures. My takeaway after the session was that there is of course no one right answer to any of the hard questions and that the key part of finding your own success is knowing who you are and what you want. The conversation about how to build Ed-Tech companies we can be proud needs to be ongoing. Thanks to the EIA for making it a central part of their conference this year.