MAY 2014

Join Us! Research Q and A with Justin Ellsworth: Wikis and Professional Development Best Practices

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 what you 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 study from 2009 to 2011. He 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. He researched how to best design technology training practices and measured their effects on teacher learning. Read his whole article.

Join Justin and Wikispaces on Thursday, June 5th, at 12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern. Register now and get ready to be inspired!

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Take Wikis at your School to the Next Level

Is your institution, district or organization looking to build a collaborative wiki environment that integrates with your existing systems? Wikispaces Campus and Wikispaces Private Label offer the administrative features and security controls that will allow you to create and maintain a network of wikis for your users.

Fill out this brief form if you would like to discuss your project or get started with a little help from Eric.

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Featured Wiki: With Ray Mirshahi’s Wikis, Anything is Possible

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 hed like for different audiences. We think its a great example, and encourage you to give it a go yourself! Remember teachers, you can have unlimited wikis on Wikispaces.

Read on for tips on setting up navigation, organizing whole group projects for full-class lesson engagement, small group project spaces for group work, and individual project spaces to create places for students to post their on interests and passions.

Tip from Ray: To create a space where students can quickly upload their work and get feedback:
1. Create a Project
2. Add all of your students as members of that Project
3. Ask Students to add a file to the project- each file will then show up on "All Pages" and each file can then be quickly accessed, graded, and responded to using the Commenting feature

A Message from Erin

One of the cool things about holding the operations title within a small team is that you get to be involved with each team member in some capacity and exposed to many different projects. Last month I spent time looking for candidates to expand the team. This month, I am identifying which metrics are most important to track as the team builds the next iteration of Wikispaces Classroom.

Both of these projects challenged me to focus on what really matters, and spurred a blog post about co-creativity based on the years I spent in corporate social responsibility, a field similar to education in many ways.

Read more about Erin here, and stay tuned for more new Wikispaces team members sharing their passion for education on our blog.

What will you do with your next wiki?

Good idea: Using a wiki to flip your classroom.

Bad idea: Physically flipping your classroom.