Free Software to Help Teach

Check out the new Free Software page above. They are a small collection of programs and web sites that I’ve found useful and have added to our teachers laptops.

Filed under: ActivBoard, Education, Educational Technology, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, K-12 Schools, Promethean, Technology, Web 2.0, Wikis, software , Weblog

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

Assembly Line Education

Are we creating cars or are we teaching are kids how to grow, learn, be inventors, or most importantly to think for themselves and be creative. As we have added a multitude of tests, mandated reading and writing blocks are we taking away from the creative process of teaching and learning? That’s what it looks like from my vantage point.

We are teaching to the tests because that is what the local school board, the state and the federal government are looking at for Adequate Yearly Progress. Our kids are being asked to learn the test, not be creative. They are becoming machines, clones, a car that knows the same thing, does the same thing. Where do you add podcasts, wiki’s, blogging, all forms of collaborate learning when you are restricted to blocks and what you are supposed to teach? Where do you fit the technology in when you have to teach to a test that leaves creativity out? David Warlick makes an interesting point along these lines in is 2 cents worth blog…

I frequently use a manufacturing model to describe our education system. Our students roll down the assembly line where we install math on them, and we install reading, and science, and social studies, and at the end of the line our quality control engineers measure each product to make sure that it complies with the blueprints — to make sure that every student knows exactly the same things. Source: 2 Cents Worth » Becoming the Machine

It might be nice that our kids should know the same things, but it doesn’t allow for the genius of creativity or expression of different ideas. Growth dies in a system that you standardize. The United States will never gain a place as one of the best educated nations by producing clones. Children are not machines that should be run down the assembly line of k-12 education. Teachers need the freedom to choose creative lessons within a loose framework of guidelines and expectations for student progress. We are going to lose more ground to other nations if we continue down the road of standardization in teaching and mandated testing.

That’s what I think….What about you?

Filed under: Education, Educational News, Educational Technology, Elementary School Information, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education, K-12 Schools, Technology, Web 2.0, Wikis , Family Matters, Weblog