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.

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

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?

Will Richardson had an interesting topic for his blog the other day and it caught my eye as some of the idea’s that I’m trying to get started at my elementary school. The five topics that Will asks about are:

1. Wikipedia–as in teaching kids about the collaborative construction of knowledge.
2. Cell phones–as in teaching how to use them effectively as tools for “just in time learning.”
3. MySpace–as in teaching the safe and effective use of the Internet to build networks and publish content.
4. Martinlutherking.org–as in teaching the skills necessary for navigating a world where editing occurs post publication.
5. Google–as in teaching the skills to find the information we want.

What other “basics” would you add?

Source: Weblogg-ed » What’s in Your Curriculum?

Now lets take these 5 items as I see them in our school district. These are in no particular order other than what I considered most important when I read them.

First of all MySpace is blocked by the websense filters as I believe it should be, but there is no reason to not teach Internet safety. I believe you can create a teaching situation that is behind the firewalls that you create a social networking site for the kids that teaches how to interact, publish and be safe at the same time.

Secondly, I see Google as a great source of information. We have already used it to research a 5th grade project called Heritage Day. The students Googled their family names, got relative background and coat of arms, came up with some background from their parents and put it all together on poster boards for an evening program for their parents. Teaching about Google as a media, new library source is the way to give children the step up into technology that they need.

Thirdly, I feel that cell phones have no place in the learning environment. With the latest technology kids have learned how to take pictures of answers, sent them to friends, text answers back and forth so well that it makes for too much of a temptation to cheat. “Just in Time Learning” is “Just in Time Temptation to Cheat”.

Fourth on this for me is Martinlutherking.org, which Will has pointed out to me in his comment below is a learning experience in what is not good in our society. This site rewrites history in an extremist view, and that this site even tries to influence our kids should be an example for us to teach that these views are the extreme minority of society. I can’t stress enough that after looking at this site any reasonable adult will see the hateful nature of the site and why we need to teach our kids why it is wrong to feel that way.

Lastly, Wikipedia and wiki’s as a whole are going to be one of the greatest tools in learning that has come to the front in technology. Wiki’s can be used by a class to create a complete lesson on any topic with everyone contributing what they have found in the course of studying. Wiki’s and blogs are where teaching can make great strides in a very short period of time.

It’s a lot to think about, but that’s what teaching is all about. Thinking, learning and adapting.

That’s what I think….What about you?

As I walk through classes to fix a computer I see a lot of teachers using CD’s to learn on the computer. After taking the time to look, the programs on these CD’s are written mostly for use with Windows 95 or 98. They only work with the CD in the drive or don’t work correctly with Windows XP. A lot of the teachers using these CD’s have been teaching for over 10 years, most 25 or more. I see this as an opportunity to educate our teachers that there are many more resources available on the web. These web based resources lead to more effective learning with the students. Let’s see how….

The first way is by letting a group or class of students use the same resource at the same time. When you are using a CD to teach, for example numbers, only one student can use it at a time in a classroom setting while working on the classroom computers. While on the other hand, in the classroom you can load the site on a teacher laptop, plug it into the video projector and put it up on a screen or an ActivBoard depending what you have available. You are then engaging a whole class at one time, seeing who is learning and who isn’t. You get to see a bigger picture than you see when each child has to wait to use a CD. Yes, you can load the CD on the teacher laptop, but these CD’s tend to run slow while having to access information versus a broadband connection of a web based application.

Another way web based activity is a better way to learn is when you have multiple computers in the classroom and the students are doing stations during a reading or writing block. the students on the computer station can all load the reading web site to work on the same assignment. This gives the teacher a more streamlined lesson plan that they can follow with the students on the computer station, the same as with a reading station at a round table. The teacher can discuss the same reading assignment with these students, instead of having to ask different questions for different CD’s.

To me this is just better use of time and learning material. At our school the Instructional Technology Coach, K1 lab instructor and myself have gotten together and found many sites that we have added to our Technology web page. The links are from a variety of teachers, but everyday we are looking for more. Please check out our links, maybe we have one you don’t. If you have one that you think would be helpful, please drop add a comment to this blog for me.

These are just two examples, there are so many more…Podcasts, blogs, Wiki’s, student online newsletters and the list goes on…..

That’s what I think….What about you?

Update 8/03/07: It’s been almost a year since this post. I’ve just written a review of two different Wiki’s that you can use in education. Read it here Which Wiki to Use after you finish reading this post.

Posted: September ‘06

A teacher asked me the other day about starting a blog within her grade level. She also mentioned Wiki’s, but from her email I could tell that she did not understand what each one was. She had a blog confused as a Wiki, but her intent is what is important.

With all the testing, new mandated reading blocks, use of the computer labs for one complete hour and the practice testing during some of that lab time, I don’t see how the teachers can do anything that’s cutting edge Web 2.0. But here we have a grade level of teachers that wants to use these technologies to help their students learn. I totally agree that these strategies can fit into a curriculum that strives to have our children pass a standardized test. What we need to do is to show the people at the decision making level that it works within the framework they have set up.

How do we do that you ask? Well, it takes hours of effort after classes end and seeding of a blog or Wiki. I started this blog as an example of what you can do with a blog, and I’ve recently created a Wiki to show how easy it is to do. I also write another blog off the education topic called Anything Goes Discussion that I’ve been writing in frequently to see what people like to read and how different styles bring greater responses. It has been going quite well, so much so that I am going to start blogging here on a much more regular basis to increase it’s exposure. I’m also going to seek out other educational blogging folks to learn from in the education field and maybe this seed will grow a big tree in our school district.

As I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve gotten many ideas, so many in fact that I’ve had to stop and write down so that I can go back and brainstorm on them. One of the ideas I’ve gotten is from Will Richardson’s excellent blog Weblogg-ed and the particular recent entry about Elementary School Publishing and Kids Teaching. I hope to push this idea with the principal and see if we can get the 4th grade team to take up the mantle and run with it for the school.

That’s what I think….How about you?