Which Wiki to Use?

I’ve been looking at two different Wiki sites lately for use at our school and thought I would review them here for you.

I’ve been using Wikispaces.com for just about a year now for tech support of our staff. They have a special upgrade for teachers in the K-12 field which is very enticing. The pricing before the educational special is as follows:

The upgrade for teachers is to the Plus account which adds some good features in being ad-free, full privacy, SSL security and custom themes. The increase in storage space for uploaded files to 20 MB is a nice upgrade also. The actual “Total File Storage” stays at 2 GB for the Plus plan, but that is quite a lot of space.

The second wiki site I’ve been looking at is PBwiki.com. I’ve just started using PBwiki, having setup a school wiki for our AP to use as a site for parents to come to for lesson plans and ideas from their child’s teacher on how to study for those lessons. The PBwiki site does not offer a special free upgrade for educators to a normally paid plan unfortunately. Their plan structure is as follows:

As you can see, the PBwiki site is more expensive $9.95/month versus $5.00 per month for Wikispaces. Everything on the PBwiki site is more expensive than on Wikispaces for that matter.

They also have different approaches to creating your wiki. The first difference you will notice is that PBwiki makes it easier to create and edit your wiki. They are using a new “point and click” interface that is very easy to use and includes some great plugins. Some of those include a Calendar, Google gadgets, Chats, Math Equations and YouTube videos.

On the other side, Wikispaces is more like a real wiki in which you do have a visual editor, but you have to know some wiki language to get some of the same effects that you can get in PBwiki. In Wikispaces, I do like that you can use the text editor to code things like anchors to places on the same page in the wiki without using a Table of Contents.

I haven’t tried coding an anchor in PBwiki yet, but if I didn’t know how to do it I would have to look around to find help on the subject. The “classic mode” on PBwiki is the basic text editor which from the little I looked at it, didn’t impress me. It doesn’t use line breaks to separate your text or code into readable form, whereas the Wikispaces text editor looks like your actual wiki page in spacing things out so that you can read them and find what you are looking for.

Speaking of help, I believe the help files (wiki pages) on Wikispaces is richer than the FAQ that is used with PBwiki. I did a search for “Anchor” on PBwiki and it could not find anything for me (see picture). On the other hand I found a complete tutorial on the Wikispaces wiki about anchors. This to me means that the authors of PBwiki would rather you do all your work in their new “Point and Click” mode. While that is all well and good, it does limit you when you want to do something like anchors and can’t find it.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, both of these wiki platforms are well worth a try. I believe they both have advantages and disadvantages. If you are a more seasoned user, you will probably like Wikispaces better. If you want the ease of use with the point and click environment then you will like PBwiki better. My overall choice is Wikispaces for it’s free upgrade for educators, its better integration of help files and its easier to use text editor for more advanced editing.

Rankings

The rankings are based on 1 being the best and 5 being the worst.

	PBwiki	Wikispaces
Price/Upgrade Policy	3	1
WYSIWYG Editor	1	2
Text Editor	5	2
Help/Search	4	2
Overall	3	2

 

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Technorati tags: Wiki, Wikispaces, PBwiki, Education, K12 Education

Filed under: Education, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, K-12 Schools, Web 2.0, Wikis , Technology & the Internet

FCAT, FCAT and more FCAT

The 2007 FCAT scores and School Grades are out. Both show a decrease from last year, but the county I work in did quite well. In fact all but one of 25 elementary schools got an A, while the other got a B. The high schools need work as 3 out of the six high schools dropped one letter grade, with one dropping to a D.

The FCAT has been around since 1999, and the kids from the elementary grades 3, 4, 5 should be 10th, 11th and 12th grade high school students. Why, if the elementary schools have been doing so well are the high schools lagging behind?

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Lack of standardization in teaching from elementary to high school.
2. Kids get older, are given more choices both in school and at home. They are not mature enough yet to know how to process those choices.
3. Outside of school the kids are more and more on their own with both parents working or a single parent household.

Here are some thoughts on how to correct them:

1. Standardize classes with reading, writing and science blocks.
2. Limit choices at school to 4 major topics of study and fewer elective classes in those major topics of study.
3. Segregate the freshmen classes in high schools to a certain building for most of the day. Allowing only grade intermingling during lunch, study hall and at school events.
4. Require more parent involvement.

One other thing that I don’t think some of the community understands or gets to see is that the high schools need to be the most up to date facilities that we have. Students cannot learn as well in a run down 40 year old school with exposed pipes as they can in a modern, clean, well maintained school.

Want FCAT results? We need to change, we need to follow new directions in our teaching.

Technorati tags: FCAT, Education, K12 Education, Standardized Testing, Florida, No Child Left Behind

Filed under: Education, Educational News, Elementary School Information, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, K-12 Schools, No Child Left Behind , Educational Testing, Family News, FCAT

Legislature OK’s Tax-Cut Plan with Cuts to Education

Here’s a quote about the newly passed tax reform in Florida:

The cuts would also require up to $1.5 billion in cuts for 2008-09 education funding, though GOP lawmakers promised that they would use state revenue from the sales tax and other sources to make it up.

Source Sarasota HeraldTribune: Legislature OK’s tax-cut plan with choices

Do you really think that the Florida Legislators are going to make up the funds with promises? Lets get real, if it’s not written down, it’s not going to happen. Extrapolation give us, with the current property tax reform proposal, a reduction in public education’s tax base by more than $7.5 billion over 5 years.

So, the kids still need to pass the FCAT with $7.5 billion less in funds to help them learn with? Doesn’t sound like Florida cares about it’s youth.

Technorati tags: Education, Tax Reform, Florida

Filed under: Education, Educational News, Elementary School Information, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, K-12 Schools , Family Matters, Family News