Focusing on one thing

I had a pretty full week last week, so I’m a little behind on some blog posts (and everything else).  My week ended with a presentation to a group fellow teachers on Saturday.  I partnered with Barb, an outstanding and innovative 3rd grade teacher, for a presentation on wikis.  Instead of giving the ins and outs of everything wiki related we decided to put an emphasis on embedding.  While there are a million uses for wikis and they are a great collaborative space, it’s difficult to add lots of content to a wiki, blog, or website if you don’t know how to embed.  This seems like a simple enough task, but something a lot of educators don’t know about.

Most of the teachers in our audience were experienced teachers, inexperienced with technology.  During the presentation we started a new wiki on PBworks and then had the attendees add all the content to it.  While we didn’t get to all the items on our agenda, most everyone had a good grasp the basics of embedding and manipulating content on their pages by the time we finished.  You can see the wiki by clicking here.

There were a couple other interesting points of information that came out of the presentation.  We gave a survey at the beginning and I was pleased to find that most teachers had access to labs or rolling carts on a regular basis. Unfortunately, many schools did not have wireless.  Also, most of the teachers reported that sites like YouTube weren’t blocked.  One of the first things we had teachers do was embed a movie, so it was good to see that they’d be able to use Youtube videos when they make there own wikis.   We’ll be meeting with the attendees again in a month and everyone is supposed to share how they’ve used a wiki in their classroom.  I’m looking forward to see what people do.

PB Works over Wikispaces – for now

Upon returning from my “un-plugged” vacation this past week, I came across several posts in my reader about Wikispaces. Prior to this summer, I’d used wikispaces for several wikis and found it to be very useful and relatively easy to use. This summer, I decided to use PB Works as the main platform for sharing and collaborating with the class I taught to 1st year and beginning teachers. After nearly a month of dedicated use with PB Works, I went back to edit one of my Wikispace wikis and found it rather clunky and missing some of the features I’d grown accustomed to on PB Works.

These are some of the things I like most about PB Works in comparison to Wikispaces:

• Folders – On PBWorks, you can put pages in different folders instead of an ever growing list of page links down the side of your wiki.  It’s a great way to organize classes, students, or topics.
• Table options – Tables are difficult to manipulate in Wikispaces.  In PB Works, I can manipulate the size of individual cells or the entire table down to the pixel, split cells, merge cells, change backgrounds, and more.  Making your table do what you want is a pain with Wikispaces.
• More intuitive interface – PB Works’ user interface is far superior to Wikispaces.  While you can do the same things on both platforms, things are easier to find and use in PB Works.  On Wikispaces you have to click through a couple windows just to center something.
• Cheaper for advanced permissions – Wikispaces and PB Works give you a pay option if you want to assign user level permissions for various pages.  The only difference is that PB Works is half the price of Wikispaces ($100 per year vs. $200 per year).
• Free, no advertising wikis not limited to K-12 – PB Works’ free wikis are open to higher ed., businesses, or anyone for free without advertising.  Though you could probably use a free wikispace for higher ed., it says that it is only for K-12.  Otherwise your space will have an advertising bar down the side.

The one thing I like about Wikispaces over PB Works is the discussion page tab listed on every page. PB Works has a comments section on each page, but the discussion feature on Wikispaces is a little more useful. The drawback for both platforms is that the comments/discussions aren’t threaded. One way to overcome this limitation is to put in your own threaded comments with an app like Disqus.

If you’ve been using Wikispaces for a while, I encourage you to give PB Works a try.  This summer, the wiki we used for EDU 586 was almost like an office/library for our class.   Each student had his/her own space to practice with during the first week of class and later made another page to host the lesson they taught as part of the course.  Throughout the class, students (and myself) continued to add to the wiki with comments or new pages.  I know that I will refer back to it frequently and many of the students in the class voiced a similar sentiment.  My hope for this year is to get our entire middle school collaborating on a wiki (probably PB Works).  I envision it as an online portfolio where students can keep their work and collaborate with their peers and/or as a workspace for class projects.

The next project

Now that summer school is over, I’ve been working on the next class I’m teaching, which starts Monday. It’s a graduate course in educational technology and this is my first year teaching it. Over the past several months I’ve been developing the syllabus and planning each class for the three week course. The main focus of the course is not to show the teachers a bunch of cool apps, but to help them develop a methodology for working with technology that is adaptable to the ever changing tools and students we encounter.

This class is a 3 hour course that meets five days a week, so I’ve tried to make it as practical and accessible as possible. To do this, I’m administering all the course content through a wiki instead of the proprietary software used by the university. The students will be building much of the wiki themselves as they work through the class and my hope is that they’ll be comfortable enough with it to start their own during the year. For other wikis my students and I have made (wiimote wiki and resource wiki) we used wikispaces. Free wikis (without advertising) on wikispaces are only available for K-12, so I decided to check out PB Works (formerly PB Wiki). To say the least I’ve been very impressed with it. PB Works is very user friendly and powerful at the same time. There are a few features (page privacy and more robust user management) that I’m tempted to pay for, but not for the course I’m teaching now.

The wiki is a constant work in progress and I’ll be updating a lot over the weekend, but I’d love to hear any feedback from readers. You can check it out at http://tech586.pbworks.com. Feel free to look at the survey, but please refrain from filling it out or I’ll have to delete your entry because it affects one of the projects.

Since I’m planning for three hours a day, I’ve broken each class into two parts. So far I’ve gotten the first week of classes on the wiki completed and will finish the rest soon. The second week of class, the teachers/students will be teaching mini lessons and constructing the wiki pages for those classes. During the final week, we’ll be looking at some administrative issues involving technology. I’ll probably post those pages sometime next week. Even though I have all the classes planned, building all the elements of the wiki has taken some time.  Please share your feedback.