Susan M. Bearden is the Director of Information Technology at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, FL. As a technology leader, she strives to leverage technology to improve educational and business outcomes and provide teachers and students with the support, tools and training needed to help them become responsible digital citizens and 21st century learners. She has presented at a number of national and state conferences including ISTE, FETC, CoSN, and the Florida Council of Independent Schools (FCIS). A frequent guest blogger, she is a contributing author to the Huffington Post and was ranked #9 on their list of "The 50 Most Social CIOs on Twitter." Bearden co-founded and moderates #edtechchat and is a board member of Get Social Brevard. Connect with her on Twitter @s_bearden and @HTEATech or at www.susanmbearden.com.  Wikispaces teachers are always exploring how to use technology in innovate new ways.When we find gems in the community like Susan Bearden, we are eager to share with you all how they are helping teachers find great learning opportunities! Susan is the co-moderator of the weekly #edtechchat that happens on Twitter every Monday evening at 8pm Eastern time. She joined us recently to share how #edtechchat was started, and how she uses an archive wiki to keep all of the great content in one place. #edtechchat started in April 2013 from a need for an educational-technology specific Twitter chat. If you’ve never joined a Twitter chat experience, you can participate in several ways. For starters, you can view the stream during the week by searching #edtechchat and viewing and interacting with the contributions. You can also share a link or resource that is related to educational technology or the weekly topic. Finally, you can join the live conversation for the hour on Monday evenings 8pm Eastern time.If none of these options work for you, Susan has made it very simple to view all of the great resources being shared weekly by hosting the edtechchat wiki! Simply head to edtechchat.wikispaces.com to view uploaded .pdf archives of each chat and learn about the bios of the founders. Get your archives each week off of the wiki page. Susan and the moderator team are located all over the United States wikis help them to collaborate and easily clearly share responsibilities. Wikispaces was the first choice to host the archives because it’s easy to use, easy to maintain, and so helpful to distribute access to editing for an entire team!Want to Try It?If you have resources that need to be archived often, try out Susan’s simple method of creating a wiki, creating an archive page, adding a Table and uploading documents and resources for folks to quickly get. Make it collaborative by inviting several of your colleagues as Organizers of the wiki under the Members area. Make a new archive wiki now! And if you are new to Twitter and #chats, be sure to check out Susan’s TweechMe app developed especially for teachers getting involved in Twitter and developing their personal learning network. Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions, and see you on Monday nights, all!

We’ve had the pleasure of knowing the team behind a great lesson building platform called Blendspace for a while now. They are super talented people who, a couple of years ago, decided to commit themselves to building products that would make a difference in the lives of teachers. And they’ve done a great job. For those of you who haven’t used it, Blendspace is a beautiful and powerful tool for creating digital lessons that are tailored to students’ needs. The Blendspace team’s key insight was that teachers want to pull together different types of resources from different sources and turn them into lessons they can easily give to their students. And Blendspace has been used by half a million teachers and students worldwide so they’ve learned an enormous amount about how to help teachers do just that. Of course passion for helping teachers and the development of great products by listening to those teachers are the two foundations of what we do at Wikispaces. In addition to that cultural fit, there’s a great product fit. We are currently working on making it easy to deploy the enormous number of resources TES teachers have shared with each other on the TES Resources platform. It is clear to us that the ability to use those resources in building fully formed lessons is going to be a super important part of what we want to build for teachers. And so we decided that we wanted the Blendspace team to become part of the Wikispaces team and help us deliver on that vision. Thankfully they felt the same way and we’re thrilled to announce that Blendspace is now part of Wikispaces, and the broader TES Global family. Blendspace, the product, will continue to operate and we have some great surprises for the passionate Blendspace users that you can read about on the Blendspace blog. So leave a comment below to say hi to the Blendspace team, try out Blendspace for yourself, and if you’re interested in giving us feedback on what we’re working on together, drop us a note.

It’s #edcamp season! What is an EdCamp? EdCamp is free, democratic, participant-driven professional development for teachers.Twitter and the web is on fire with Edcamp sign-up announcements as many educators around the world prepare to go back to school. We’ve been supporters of EdCamp from the start. Adam (one of our company co founders) spoke at the first one in Philadelphia 4 years ago, and now over 500 have happened! We’re excited to highlight the Edcamp lineup for this school year and encourage folks to start their own using wikis!Dan Callahan, one of the founders of Edcamp, and chairman of the Edcamp Foundation, gave us a few tips for using wikis to organize your EdCamp. First, head to edcamp.wikispaces.com. There, you’ll see a list of existing events. See one in your neighborhood? Click on it and register and start dreaming of the fun learning you’ll have! You can also start your own by simply adding a new page to the home page. "A wiki is an excellent place to get started to promote things," Dan says. "A lot of people go to your wiki to look for your event, so keep it up to date. Thanks to all the features and widgets, it’s also really easy to add maps and other useful information for those attending the event." The main EdCamp wiki also houses valuable information on how to organize, finance, and implement your own Edcamp as well. Why go? Tips for Using Your Wiki Are You Going to or Organizing an EdCamp? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us with your site at www.twitter.com/wikispaces, we’re happy to spread the word!

Hi, my name is Sid and I joined Wikispaces not to disrupt education. I’m here to build useful education tools (i.e., more "ed" than "tech"). My previous jobs were at Kiva.org (where I learned how passion can be channeled for social benefit), Oakland Unified School District (where I learned the meaning of access, and lack thereof), and Yahoo (where I learned how to serve a large global audience). I’m hoping my unique experiences can serve the tireless educators of the world.As a former educator, I know teachers don’t want to do any more work than they already have to. Students, administrators, and parents sometimes naively don’t know (or, even, forget) how internally motivated teachers are to do their job. Folks trying to sell things to educators also forget that too. It has to be more than just packaging widgets with some cause-based rhetoric. If we at Wikispaces do our job right, the products we build will require less work by teachers to accomplish their goals. In short, we are trying to make it easier, in an era of unprecedented technology (and equally unprecedented gaps in access). It will take time, a lot of work, and a bunch of teachable moments, but, hopefully, with your help and advice, we’ll get there. If you read How to Succeed in Education by the founders of Wikispaces, then you’ll find that I’m working with a team that is inspired, hard-working, smart, yet, very patient.As an engineer at Wikispaces, I’m here to build. I don’t mind doing more work than I have to because, one day, it’ll save time for those that need it more than me.

This past school year, my mother retired after 25 years teaching in a K-8 school in New Hampshire. At her retirement party I found myself surrounded by her friends, most of them teachers who I’ve known for years. Several use Wikispaces, and one explained that a 2007 YouTube video called "Wikis in Plain English" was her first introduction into what a wiki could be used for. This four-minute video shows how a group of four friends prepare for a camping trip by collaborating on a wiki page. By listing the items they already have, and creating a list of what they still need to bring, they are able to decide who will bring what. The same teacher recalled: "When I watched that short video in 2007, it quickly made sense what a wiki was useful for: quick and easy collaboration!" She then recounted how she used Wikispaces to create an exercise for her students, and how (again, in 2007) she was advised by her school’s administration to cease using wikis altogether. As she put it, wikis at that time were considered "a low-class teaching tool." Over the past decade wikis have become powerful and commonplace tools, especially inside the classroom, so we all had a good laugh at that. But her story brought up a good point: what does the future hold for wikis and teachers? Even more than currently takes place, the near future will see teachers collaborating with teachers to become better teachers. The dictionary defines collaboration as: the action of working with someone to produce or create something. By definition, collaboration creates something. On the near horizon, there are at least three parts that will come together: When teachers collaborate on these platforms, what exactly is created? If you watched the 4-minute "Wikis in Plain English" video, you saw a very basic collaboration take place between four friends, and it was easy to see what was created: the camping group discussed the needs of the trip and created a list of needed items, then decided who would bring what. The discussions and lists eventually informed them: ‘we have everything we need; we’ll have a great trip.’ Similarly, teachers can collaborate to become informed about what content is the most relevant and effective. The syllabus provides teachers with a structure that helps them plan and execute their creative vision of education. Teachers from all over the world will share relevant content, rate the quality of content, and integrate new ideas into their classrooms. This collaboration, and the content being discussed, will help them build a story within the structure of their syllabus. The specific value that is created lies in the quality of content and the number of choices provided to the teacher to ‘create their story’ with. That is the real creation of teachers collaborating. What we’re seeing now and will see more of in the future is teachers collaborating, in a way, with the content itself. Teachers will only continue to have even better resources and methods to teach those resources. In the next post, we’ll look at teaching content that exists as a living document, continually edited and updated, and why this can be so valuable to students. What is your school currently doing to facilitate teacher collaboration? Teachers, how have you collaborated with other teachers in the past? Please share your insights below.

Hey, I’m Amy! I am one of the folks behind Blendspace, the easiest way to create and deliver online lessons. I’m super excited to join Wikispaces and TES Global because we all share the same goal of serving teachers. Together we will work together to create even more delight in teachers’ lives. My journey in "ed-tech" began when I was a computer science student at the University of Southern California. I fell in love with technology at a young age and taught myself how to program when I was 11 years old. As one of the few girls in my classes, I knew if I wanted to get more girls interested in STEM, the best place to do that is in the classroom. So I spent time in the classrooms of Los Angeles teaching young girls math. Given my love for technology, the only way I knew how to make learning engaging was through the use of technology. I put together lessons with YouTube videos, online games, websites, etc. However, finding good resources was hard and putting them together was also a challenge… Have you ever tried to embed a YouTube video in a PowerPoint?! After graduating from USC, I worked as a product manager on Microsoft Excel designing to make spreadsheets more intuitive for everyone, especially students. But after three years in the corporate world, I knew I wanted to get closer to the classroom. I remembered the struggles that I faced when I was with my students; I asked teachers if they were still struggling with finding engaging lesson material. With more technology in the classrooms, the answer was an overwhelming "yes". So I convinced my Microsoft colleague, Gabriel Cebrian and others to quit and join me on this journey of helping teachers through technology. It’s now been two years since we moved from Seattle to San Francisco to join Imagine K12, the first edtech incubator. We built Edcanvas, rebranded to Blendspace, served half a million teachers and students and now we are here at Wikispaces! It has been an incredible journey as a edupreneur. I never knew I wanted to start a company, I just knew that I wanted to make an impact in the classroom. Blendspace was a great start. Now it’s time to time to build upon that strong foundation at Wikispaces.

#teachingmoment Join a LIVE Global Teaching Experiment today at 11am Mountain Time Zone! We have a lot of excellent teachers around the world using Wikispaces in their classrooms RIGHT NOW and we’d love to hear how you’re using it .TES is asking teachers to share their #teachingmoment from their teaching day at 11am. Read more here and join in now! There are 5 iPads to be won and it should paint an awesome picture of a day in the life of a teacher- we hope you’ll share and we’ll retweet your your teaching moment as well! Read the hashtag and join the global community of educators about their #teachingmoments.

Today we are announcing that Wikispaces is no longer offering a free option for non-education wikis. We are even more committed than ever to offering our free services for anyone in education, and we are building more and more great free functionality for teachers and others in education every day, but for anyone outside of education, Wikispaces is no longer offering a free option. Existing wikis on Wikispaces that are not categorized as being used in education, have started displaying a banner that shows three options: If the wiki is being used in Pre-K, K-12, or Higher Education, you can choose the option to categorize your wiki as an education wiki. Once we verify that your wiki is being used in education, it will remain active and will be free going forward. If the wiki is not being used in education and you want to keep it, you may choose to upgrade your wiki to our Plus plan ($50 per year, or $5 per month) or our Super plan ($200 per year, or $20 per month). If you have several wikis you want to upgrade you may want to consider our Private Label service which gives you unlimited wikis with more integration and administrative options starting at $1,000 per year for 100 users. If you no longer wish to keep your wiki active, you may allow your wiki to expire and it will be deleted. If you would like to export the contents of your wiki you can download the contents of your wiki in wikitext, HTML, or PDF format. We know this may come as frustrating news to many long term non-education users of Wikispaces but its an important decision for us as we move forward with our core mission of serving teachers and the broader education community. We hope that our $50 per year option is a good one for most people who would like to keep their non-education wiki on Wikispaces and we will of course do our best to help everyone through this transition. If you have any questions or need our help please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@wikispaces.com

TES Labs is a new platform that engages the most important people in education - teachers - to share their ideas and expertise with entrepreneurs. The result will be better products and services for the classroom. On the site, start-ups ask teachers from all over the world for feedback on their products, which are automatically matched up to registered teachers based on their profiles, through short weekly surveys. The start-ups will then be able to act on the advice they are given, while teachers will be entered into regular prize draws. TES Labs Example: Propagate (www.mypropagate.com) TES Labs is hosting Propagate, (www.mypropagate.com) a startup keen to hear from teachers about how it can better hone its products to suit their needs. The technology Propagate has developed allows teachers to set up word lists for pupils to memorize that are designed to be more intuitive than flash cards or normal workbooks. The system highlights specific words that a teacher wants students to learn as they read a piece of text online. It can provide real-time explanations of what words mean, and sets quizzes to strengthen students’ understanding by placing words in context. Emily Schu, co-founder of Propagate, said the digital tool was currently at beta-testing stage, and she hoped that input from teachers on TES Labs would allow her team to better tailor the concept. "Getting ongoing feedback from teachers will allow us to develop our product and tweak certain functionality," Ms Schu said. "We can launch it, but then iterate it and customize it to help teachers get the most out of our product." Teachers, Please Try It Out! Please visit www.tes.co.uk/labs and sign up, then give us feedback on this new platform! Tell us what you think about the site and the questionnaires in the comments section below!

Adding Members to Your Wiki Wikispaces offers easy ways to add new Members to your Classroom wikis. First, let’s start with a quick refresher on some terminology. A User is defined as anyone with a username and password for wikispaces.com. When you go to wikispaces.com and log in, you are signing into your User account. Anyone can create a User account for free. When a User joins a wiki using one of the methods below, they become a Member of that wiki. A single User can be a Member of any number of wikis on wikispaces.com. Membership for your wiki can mean different things. If your wiki is Protected, all Users can view its content, but only Members will be able to edit. If your wiki is Private, only Members will be able to view and edit content. More information about permission settings can be found here. Now let’s have a look at how to add new Members. The Invitation Tool A Wikispaces classic. Just use the + button next to the Members link and paste in the username or email address of the Users you would like to make Members of this wiki. It’s the perfect way to announce to a specific audience that your new wiki is up and running. The Invite Code A new tool for Organizers to add a group of new Members into their wiki in one swoop. Organizers can activate a temporary join code from their wiki’s settings area, pass out the code during their class or meeting so Users can navigate to the wiki and enter this code to become a Member of the wiki. More info can be found here. The User Creator If your students do not have Wikispaces User accounts, this tool will allow you to create them in bulk. The new accounts will already have a membership to your wiki when they sign in! First, create a spreadsheet or list of the unique usernames, passwords and email addresses (the latter is optional) that you would like to use for your student roster and then: Go to your wiki and click the Settings link. Click the User Creator link Select the appropriate wiki from the Which wikis do you want to add users to? drop down menu and click the +Add Another Wiki button for updating members on multiple spaces. Paste in the usernames or upload the spreadsheet containing these usernames and click Continue. Select the column containing users names. Do not worry about email addresses or passwords - there will be no changes made to existing accounts. Click Continue You will be notified about any errors (existing usernames, unaccepted characters, etc.). Make any appropriate changes, if needed. Click Create Users And for our Private Label and Campus users, you can automatically add memberships to existing Users from the Site Administration area and bypass the invitation process entirely. The Wiki Details page Go to Site Administration. Click the Search link under the Wikis heading. Search for the wiki you would like to add this user to. Hover your mouse over the wiki name and click the Details link that appears. Scroll down to Add a New Member. Type or paste in the username and click Add.

This is a guest post written by Niall Watts of the University College Dublin. Niall describes a great use of Wikispaces by Dr. Niamh Flanagan of the UCD School of Applied Social Science. He describes how Wikispaces was flexible enough to provide students a simple structure to organize their research, share and analyze surveys, and then present their findings. Dr. Niamh Flanagan of the UCD School of Applied Social Science wanted students in the first and second years of their Masters in Social Science (Social Work) to work together on the Student-2-Student Dialogue Project. The aim of this project was to investigate learning opportunities while on fieldwork placement. The first year students designed a survey for the second year students to complete on their experiences of field work. The first year students were divided into 10 research teams of about 5 members to analyze and discuss the survey findings. Each team was responsible for researching one topic. Topics included guidance and learning on placement, student preparedness for field work placements and practice supervision while on placement among others. The second year students were to comment on the findings of the first year students. It was hoped that the research would help to prepare the first year students for their own fieldwork placements. Blackboard could not be used for the project, as it involved students from two years who were not all registered in the same module. Media Services identified Wikispaces as a suitable platform for such a collaborative project. Wikispaces allows a lecturer to organize students into project teams where they can collaboratively write documents. Permissions can be set so that teams can read but not write on each other’s team pages and reviewers (in this case the second year students) can read and comment on all the team pages. Wikispaces has a simple editor which allows the addition of pictures, tables, links and other media elements. It is free for use in education. Niamh Flanagan considers the project to be a success and would repeat it. All the first year teams created a team page or pages with a detailed analysis of their findings. Most were illustrated with graphics and tables. The only downside was the small number of comments by second year students perhaps due to other study commitments. Niamh Flanagan spent no more than a day or two familiarizing herself with Wikispaces. Niall Watts from Media Services, UCD IT Services, supported the project, including a brief demonstration of Wikispaces to the students which helped them to get started. No major technical hitches were encountered during the project. For further information on this project, please contact Niamh Flanagan or Niall Watts. Original link: http://www.ucdblogs.org/ucdblogs/collaborative-online-project-years/

Not every user will use your wiki the same way. A page may be useful to one user, but not to another. Our Favorite Pages feature will allow every user to show just those pages they care about in the navigation area. The navigation area of your wiki will contain the navigation widget by default. It lists all of the pages on your wiki or those associated with a specified tag. You may have also noticed the "Favorites" heading at the top. If you have not discovered it before, this is a really handy feature to make your most used pages easier to reach! Unlike the rest of the navigation area, the Favorites page list is unique for every user. Each user can determine what their favorite pages are, creating a personal list of their most visited pages. To add a page to your favorites, click the star just to the left of the page title. The page will now appear in the navigation area under the favorites page. To remove a page from your Favorites, simply click the star again. Need to contact us? You are always welcome to send your questions to help@wikispaces.com.

    How do you use technology in your classroom? We are always interested in learning about how teachers work with education technology, and ed-tech companies. It’s key to being a good ed-tech provider and is always a great reality check. If you’d like to help, please fill out our latest survey. Your responses will be treated as confidential unless you choose to provide your name and would like us to quote you. It should take no more than 10 minutes, and if you want to provide your contact details, you’ll have a chance to win one of three iPads. Take the Survey As always, thank you for your support!  

Robert Maloy started the Resources for History Teachers wiki in 2009. This is his Wikispaces story. 1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do: resourcesforhistoryteachers is a wiki designed for teachers and students, created by teachers and students. Robert Maloy, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, began resourcesforhistoryteachers in 2009 as part of a course designed to help college students prepare for the Massachusetts History Teacher Test. Since that time, resourcesforhistoryteachers has grown beyond its initial focus to become a multimedia/multicultural history learning resource for teachers, students and schools throughout the United States and around the world: The site now includes all of the Massachusetts history standards for grades K-12 as well as the national Advanced Placement (AP) World History, United States History and American Government standards. There are more than 600 pages in the site and the number is constantly growing as users contribute new information and create subpages off main pages. Users of the wiki come from a wide-ranging community of educators committed to developing interesting and engaging curriculum for students studying history, government, economics and geography. The site now features links to multicultural and multimedia resources as well as short summaries of historical events, making it an interactive and engaging experience for history learners. There are links to primary sources, video resources, learning games, resources for teaching the histories of diverse people, historical biographies and many more materials for use in school classrooms. The goal is for teachers and students to have multiple resources for covering, uncovering and discovering the past. 2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite? Being able to create cross-links between pages is an exciting feature. Teachers and students can access information about an historical topic on one page and then explore more connections about that topic on related pages. Giving users the option to explore the pages in their own way makes this site a unique type of digital textbook for use in schools. Students can follow their own interests as explorers of the past through the lens of multiple types of learning resources. The option to add images to the pages is another favorite feature. Pictures, maps, and other visual resources serve to bring historical material alive for teachers and students while creating visually engaging pages within the wiki. We also like the idea of creating subpages off a main page so that teachers and students can explore a specific topic in more depth by leaving the main page to read and explore the subpage. 3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects? We have found that the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki can be paired with other Web 2.0 tools to create engaging history learning experiences. One idea is what we call a Wikiquest. Like a WebQuest, students explore multiple online resources as part of a class assignment. But in a Wikiquest, students do their explorations within the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki, both accessing existing materials and adding new ones so that the wiki becomes a regularly evolving digital text and learning resource. A second idea involves using the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki in conjunction with social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Diigo. Teachers and students can assemble collections of web materials on their social bookmarking site and then link that material to wiki. This is enabled teachers and students to create stacks of resources about historical figures (historical biography stacks) or events (historical event stacks). Students in classrooms can follow each other social bookmarks while all the wiki users can also access the material. 4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, "Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!" Wikis create ongoing opportunities for interaction and collaboration that result in powerful learning for teachers and students. Instead of a teacher lecturing about historical material or telling students to read online sources by themselves, wikis invite students to construct knowledge together by actively exploring existing resources and adding new ones to a public site that everyone can access and use. 5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you? Active learning, critical thinking, and collaborative interaction are the hallmarks of how the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki functions as a transformative technology for history learning by teachers and students. Wikis make historical knowledge visible and accessible to teachers and students who are both the creators and the receivers of that knowledge.

We have a great, early opportunity for teachers who are interested in selling their high-quality, original teaching materials on the new TES Resources. We are launching TES Resources in the US very soon, and teachers selling and sharing on TES Resources will be able to reach an audience of millions worldwide. We are particularly excited to hear from US teachers, but we are happy to hear from teachers from all over the world. As an early adopter, we’ll work with you through the process of organizing your materials, uploading and categorizing them, and helping you be successful as you make them available for sale. You’ll also be an invaluable part of the process we go through to make sure we build the best platform possible for teachers of all kinds. If you’re interested, fill out our form and we’ll be in touch with you shortly. We want to work with both experienced teachers and new teachers and we want to work with teachers of every grade level and subject so that we can learn how to best serve teachers everywhere. Most importantly, we’re looking for teachers who have created their own teaching materials and are interested in selling them to teachers around the world. If you have any interest, don’t hesitate to apply! Wikispaces has always been about helping teachers manage their classrooms and work with their students. Now, we are working to help teachers find and share the materials they need to engage their class and energize their lessons. We look forward to working with you on this exciting project. Fill out our application form now.

We need your help! We’re currently working on an exciting new project to help educators find and use peer-developed teaching resources. We need feedback from teachers to make sure we’re on the right track. The link below leads to a brief survey, which should take about 10 minutes. Take the survey.  Please complete the survey before 5pm PST on Friday July 17, 2015. We can’t do what we do without your feedback. Thank you! The Wikispaces team

We’re excited to invite you and all the teachers on Wikispaces to join TES, the largest online community of educators in the world. Create an account today to start uploading your original teaching materials. It’s easy to begin: Create a TES account Upload your resources Earn 100% royalty on every U.S. purchase Become an early member and you’ll: Get extra help organizing and marketing your materials Have the opportunity to provide feedback on our platform Later this summer, we’ll be opening up our marketplace to educators to browse, download, and purchase your resources on TES. We’ve been busy working on this new product and look forward to sharing it with you! If you have any questions, check out our FAQs, or contact us.

Whether you’re new to selling teaching materials online or a seasoned pro, our Content team will help you be as successful as possible in our new marketplace. They’ll provide individualized feedback, so you’ll reach more educators with your resources. You’ll get a full return on all your efforts because you’ll earn 100% royalty on every U.S. purchase. When you create a TES account, our Content team will help you: - identify teaching materials to sell and your target audience - optimize your resources, including content, pricing and descriptions - create your own personal brand Join the TES marketplace now and connect with our Content team members: Erica, Gabe, and Ritu. They look forward to meeting you! Learn more about Erica, Gabe, and Ritu below. We’ll introduce more members of the TES family from the San Francisco office in future posts! Erica Magnusson Team: Content Bio: Erica started teaching biology and literacy in a rural village in Malawi, Africa and marine conservancy on whale watching expeditions in MA during college. She then became a Teach For America corps member and was a teacher for four years at an inner-city school in San Francisco. She taught ninth grade Biology and Leadership to a diverse, enthusiastic, and inspiring group of students. High School: Sanborn Regional High School, Fremont, NH College: Eckerd College, B.S. in Biology and Environmental Studies, Minor in Human Development Grad School: Loyola Marymount University, M.Ed in Urban Administration and Policy Favorite Teacher: Professor Nancy Janus of Eckerd College, for teaching me that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Gabe Baker Team: Content Bio: Gabe started teaching Latin, English, and History to middle and high schoolers in Los Angeles after college. Two years later, he taught middle school on a boat that traveled the world (no lie). Having had his fill of boat life, he attended grad school to study online learning environments. He has also designed web-based curriculum for Curriculet and taught at the Great Books Summer Program at Stanford University and Oxford University for the past nine summers. High School: Boiling Springs High School, Carlisle, PA College: Oberlin College, B.A. in Classical Studies & B.A. in Comparative Literature Grad School: University of California, Santa Barbara, M.A. in Education Favorite Teacher: Professor Jason Raley of UCSB, for truly believing that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for living the life of the mind inside and outside of the classroom. Ritu Virmani Team: Content Bio: Ritu has taught for 9 years, beginning her teaching career as a sixth grade Math teacher at an inner-city charter school in Washington DC. The following two years took her to Dubai, where she taught middle school Math and Science at an all-girls school (many of her students were real-life princesses!). Ritu also taught at the Siena School for students with language-based learning differences in the DC area and worked with dyslexic students at the Charles Armstrong School in San Francisco. High School: John F. Kennedy High School, Silver Spring, MD College: University of Maryland, B.A. in Communication Grad School: The Johns Hopkins University, M.A. Teaching Favorite Teacher: Mr. Bowman is an extraordinary teacher who showed me the importance of small successes, laughing at oneself, and that failure is a stepping stone to great things!

Here are a few quick tips to help you become an author in our new marketplace. We’ve seen your amazing wikis and know that other educators will find the hard work you’ve put into your teaching resources extremely valuable! Tip 1: Start with resources that have been successful with your students. A resource can be any collection of learning materials that support a unit or lesson, including activities, worksheets, lesson plans, assessments, books, presentations, games, homework, flashcards, rubrics, videos, songs, scripts, outlines, and more. The most compelling resources allow for differentiated instruction by including additional versions or questions tailored to engage diverse learners. Tip 2: Your wiki makes it easy to publish resources on TES. Apply the hard work you’ve already put into your wiki and double the reward. You can upload and publish the compelling learning materials you already have on your wiki as individual resources on TES. Tip 3: Organization is key. The first file of a resource should be an attractive title page. You’ll also want to include an introduction that gives an overview, table of contents, and explanation about implementing your resource in the classroom. Consistently label and order all files. Make your resources comprehensive by including everything needed to use them successfully (e.g., assessments alongside lesson plans). Tip 4: Include keywords, Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards in resource descriptions. Resource names should be immediately recognizable in a search result. Include keywords, phrases, grade levels, and subject areas that allow your audience to quickly identify the purpose and desired learning outcomes of your resource. Tip 5: Mind your formatting. Easy-to-read fonts are typically sans serif (e.g., Arial, Verdana) and larger than 14pt. If you’re including worksheets or handouts, provide ample white space for students to write answers. Make file formats editable, so other educators can customize resources for their classrooms. Use popular file formats that don’t require special software, such as: - Documents: .doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf - Images: .jpg, .png, .gif, .bmp - Presentations: .ppt, .pptx, .pdf Tip 6: Stick to straightforward pricing. Simple resources (e.g., single lesson plans, worksheets, assessments) should generally be no more than $5, and more complex resources (e.g., booklets, videos, combinations of materials) may earn a higher price, up to $10. Consider customized pricing over $10 for only very complex resources (e.g., entire units, sets of activities). Tip 7: Respect any and all copyrights. For all content included in each resource, you must either be the copyright owner, receive permission from the copyright owner, or ensure that the content is covered under fair use or other applicable laws. The United States Copyright Office provides a detailed FAQ. You can also learn more about copyright for educators here. Find free materials on The Edublogger. Tip 8: Do a final check before hitting upload. Make sure your thumbnails are visually appealing and files are correctly ordered, including the title page. Check spelling, tags, and formatting. Include any attribution and copyright information. For step-by-step instructions about how to use our uploader tool, watch this brief video. Tip 9: Build your brand with your wiki. By becoming an author on TES, you can market your wiki and resources in multiple ways. Once the marketplace is open to the public, you can supplement your wiki with links to your resources on TES. You can also add links to your wiki in your resources’ descriptions to strengthen your online presence and deepen engagement with other educators. For more info, review our FAQ. Also, feel free to reach out to our content team at help@tesforteachers.com; they’re dedicated to helping you succeed as an author.

As a teacher, you’d like to keep tabs on your students’ activity on your class wiki, whether to review their contributions or answer posted questions right away. You could hover over each student and watch his or her every move, but you’d waste a lot of time.  A much better (and less creepy) way of monitoring activity is to use the notifications and monitor features. They allow you to receive an email each time a specific wiki, page, or discussion is edited. No more peering over each students’ shoulders - let our notifications track their activity for you. How to create notifications for a wiki: 1. Navigate to the wiki you’d like to monitor. 2. Click the changes (recent changes) link to go to your wiki’s change log. 3. Click the notification button at the top-right corner of the change log area, and then click add. 4. Begin typing in your wiki’s name and choose it from the list of options. Hint: the wiki you are viewing will always be the first item on the list before you begin typing. 5. Choose the type of notifications you’d like to receive, and click update. By default, you’ll receive an email each time a wiki or page you’re monitoring is updated. If you prefer to receive a single email that summarizes all of the content changes you are monitoring, go to your user account settings (from your dashboard) and change the email monitored changes field to "Yes - one email per day."  

We’re excited to launch our new marketplace for teacher-generated content and resources, tes.com! With over 7.3 million users, TES is home to the largest online network of teachers worldwide. You can access classroom resources and strategies from experienced educators all around the world, as well as share your own. To celebrate, we’re hooking up five lucky teachers with $100 DonorsChoose.org gift cards every week from now through November. Click the link below to join TES, and you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to win! (Find full rules here.) Join now: www.tes.com As a member of TES, you’ll enjoy: 1. Entrepreneurial Freedom - You can choose to make your content available for free or for a set price. Check out 9 tips on how to become an author. 2. Recognition - You receive 100% of proceeds from all purchases by US teachers. 3. Massive Community - TES supports 7.3 million members worldwide, including 1.8 million US teachers, and welcomes between 20,000 and 30,000 new members each month globally. 4. Business Support - You can promote yourself and your content through the authors’ shop with a bio and links to social profiles, as well as your wiki. TES’ expert Content team offers personalized guidance to help you reach your entrepreneurial goals. Our marketplace offers thousands of free and paid resources for your next lesson. Next month, we’ll integrate unique virtual classroom technology from Blendspace to help you create and deliver digital lessons using resources from tes.com.  

Today technology is transforming the eLearning industry. It is changing and will continue to change the way we communicate with learners, the way we design courses, how we learn and teach. Therefore, eLearning professionals have to adapt and find new ways to meet changing times. Simply incorporating different tools to their current eLearning training strategy isn’t enough. eLearning professionals must understand and embrace the meaning and the implications of these changes in the eLearning development process. This is not an easy task because it not only means they have to change what they do, but how they think.

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