Wikis & Workspaces

If you haven't seen the commoncraft resources, please take a moment to check them out here. We'll start with their explanation of wikis.

Of course, the rest of their work is great for helping people new to technology (especially web 2.0) to understand things like blogs and wikis. More on web 2.0

We've chosen PBWorks as our wiki/workspace. We like the folders. Obviously, you can make all sorts of choices for your own wiki. You can look at the different /resources and tools in the "navigator window" on one PB wiki which is listed here.  And there's no shortage of great resources in this category.

One of the greatest benefits we receive from using technology to provide an authentic purpose and audience for student work is the ability to provide real differentiation. We also work hard to build the strongest connections possible between reading and writing using our workspace and blog together.

One of the issues we deal with revolves around the work we want to do with images; here's some help with images and copyright.

Another thing you'll want to learn more about as you begin to add more to your website - screen shots and screen casts. These are helpful when you want to provide your audience with a lasting example of what you saw on a computer screen.

More and more, we spend time embedding all sorts of super-cool resources/tools into our blogs and wikis. As we've mentioned, you can embed almost anything on your websites. We love to embed word clouds.

We get the best ideas about what to put on the blog from our students. Usually, they figure out this kind of thing before we do. Then they teach us. It's a boon to our classroom culture.