Saturday, October 9, 2010

Quick Classroom Tech Tips: Wikispaces

Wiki wiki means quickly.

If you are looking for a great way to provide a web-based location of learning resources for your students, or a place for your student's parents to get information and ideas to help their child at home, and you want it easy to use: the award winning web tool Wikispaces could be your answer.

Wikis were initially created as a web-based collaborative tool where different users could edit a project from wherever they had an Internet connection (click here and see below for more information on wikis). Wikis have been adopted by educators as an alternative to a read only website. Students can edit a wiki site by adding images, documents, and more. There are plenty of web widgets that you can embed to make your wiki a unique place for you and your students.

Check This Out
  • Wikispaces provides teachers a "plus package" for free. One good thing about the plus package is you will have no advertisements on the side of your wiki; which is good because the ads may not be what you want on an educational wiki site.
  • The editing feature is newly revamped and easier to use. It feels a lot more like a word processing editor. Which means you can add documents, images, and embed video quickly and easily into your wiki.
  • Each Wikispaces page you create on your wiki site includes a "Discussion" tab. If you want your students to respond to a question you post, or to a fellow classmate's post, you can do it easily with the discussion feature.
  •  Wikispaces provides amazing support. The support techs folks at Wikispaces are quick to respond to your emails, and they aren't satisfied until they help you with your problem.
  • You can create student accounts with out needing an email address. 
  • You have control to customize accessibility to the wiki (e.g. email capability, page editing rights, private or public viewing etc.)
  • It will not take you long to create your wiki. You can have a functional wikispace in minutes.
Here are some examples of classroom wikispaces that might inspire you.


No comments: