It’s officially National Teacher Appreciation Week. We try to thank every teacher every day by doing what we do. But we also thought that this week we’d share some of our personal stories about teachers that have made a difference in our lives. From us to you, thank you!

Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau
Ryan Bowse
While it has been just over 20 years since I was their student I can say with the utmost confidence that I would not be where I am today if it were not for Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau. Both had a positive impact on my academic and personal growth in school. They made learning interesting, personal and enjoyable. Both were committed to my own discovery of learning. Their unwavering commitment to help me succeed is something that I am extremely grateful for in my adult life. These two teachers made a huge impact on my life and I hope they know their fantastic work has not gone unnoticed. Mrs. Donohue Nadeau and Mr. Nadeau thank you. Thank you for being fantastic teachers and masters in your craft!

Ms. Vander Naald
Ryan Koopmans
One day she said, “When you’re an adult this is what you’re going to remember learning in fifth grade.” Our teacher then assembled our art projects, rough spheres of construction paper, and demonstrated the orbits of the planets: all in one plane, moving in the same direction, at different speeds, around the tremendously larger mass of the sun. You were right, Ms. Vander Naald, that is the one thing I remember distinctly. Of course you taught me much more, things that sunk in so deeply I would never stop to think where or how I learned them. Thank you for your inventiveness and your foresight.

Professor Richard Ivry
Max Dobrusin
If I were put in charge of the task of “fusing” together the best qualities of a teacher and creating a “Frankenstein Instructor”, Professor Ivry would be the prototype. Professor Ivry is, and will always be, a great inspiration in my life. He is as enthusiastic now as he was when he first started teaching…I assume – simply because I can’t imagine that a higher level of passion for a field of study exists. I strongly remember his ability to encourage participation by illustrating concepts head-on. How many students can say that their teacher used Transcranial Stimulation on himself to show its affects on the motor-cortex? Strangely, I am also reminded of Professor Ivry’s hard (but fair!) tests, which were meticulously constructed to include ALL of the material covered, and which required a student to not only memorize facts – but to also be able to think critically and apply learned concepts. Professor Ivry, thank you for being a great instructor and for instilling in me a thirst for knowledge!

Mr. Plitt
Wendy Gorton
I loved writing long-winded romance/detective stories in middle-school, full of cliches and run-on sentences and thought maybe I’d be the next great American novelist. Mr. Plitt’s creative writing class was workshoppy and full of collaboration, and he was the kind of educator that would take a folder of 70 pages and actually read them all on the weekend and give me detailed notes as though I were a New York Times Bestselling author. And you know what? He totally made me feel like one. Go Mr. Plitt and go all awesome teachers!

Ms. Sok
Eric Ablett
Ms. Sok, was one of my history teachers back in high school and the first teacher I truly considered a friend. She specialized in humanizing historical figures and movements, placing an importance on what lessons we took away from the classroom as well as how we used that knowledge to better ourselves and our environment. It was an empowering moment when I realized that, one day, a chapter about the time we were living in would become a history lesson for future generations. To an undeterred optimist with an outlook on life and learning that I continually aspire to have myself, thank you Ms. Sok!

David
Jeff Hanke
I went to one of those middle schools where you call teachers by their first names. All the teachers were awesome, but David in particular stood out for me. He was the Math and PE teacher, in addition to being the Ultimate Frisbee coach. I’d always been interested in math, and David turned that interest into understanding. He was also responsible for my life-long (so far) love of Ultimate Frisbee. I don’t play as often as I used to, but I try to get in at least a couple of pick-up games every month. Thanks for everything, David!

Mr. Baron, Mrs. Harley, Ms. Reetz
James Byers
I was lucky to have many inspirational teachers. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade triumvirate of Mr. Baron, Mrs. Harley, and Ms. Reetz were particularly memorable. Mr. Baron taught us how to play chess, and in the process how to think about winning and losing in real life. Mrs. Harley opened our eyes to the world around us with a wonderful sense of humor. Ms. Reetz demanded and got our very best, leaving every one of us with our standards raised. I’m thankful to them and to all teachers who dedicate their lives to their students.

Mr. Schwartz
Adam Frey
There were only two of us who wanted to study computer science at my high school. But Mr. Schwartz taught the class with passion nonetheless. He took time to understand what we were looking for and helped us navigate a broad subject to get us where we wanted to go. On reflection, that was as much about learning about ourselves as it was learning about the fetch execute cycle. We both went on to degrees in computer science which heavily informed our career and lives. Thank you Mr. Schwartz. And thank you to every teacher I ever had who helped me become the person I am.

Thank a teacher today.

Because, as everyone knows, wikis are at their best when they are used for collaboration. And since Wikispaces is always working on better tools for educators, our wikis have lots of features to make classroom collaboration and group work better and easier.

Organize group work with Projects
Assigning group projects for your students is easy, but managing those assignments can be hard. It takes a lot of scheduling, and it can be tricky to make sure that everyone is doing their fair share of the work.

Projects let you cordon off little sections of your wiki and hand them over to groups of students. And as a teacher, you can manage the permissions on those teams and check in regularly on content as it progresses, which is pretty neat.

Encourage discussion
Every page on your wiki can have its own dedicated discussion board. Depending on the type of assignment the group is working on, you can use it in any number of ways: Teachers can pose open-ended topics for discussion. Students can ask the teacher for help or clarification. You can even hold lively debates — and, however you use your discussions, every query and post stays with the work on the wiki.

Give feedback and comments
Our comments feature lets you scribble notes in the margins of a wiki page (figuratively speaking). This means different things to different people. For teachers, it’s a way to ask pointed questions about specific passages, to guide students in the right direction as they work, and to give more meaningful feedback during assessment. For students working together, it’s a way to communicate more efficiently throughout the project and to engage in peer review.

Schedule Project-related Events
If you have Projects on your wiki (and all education wikis will have Projects), you also have the ability to schedule Events. These let you schedule certain activities ahead of time, so you can lock or unlock projects for editing, send student reminders about dues dates, archive Projects, and more.

1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do:
We used the wiki to facilitate a cross-town “literature circle” in which kids discussed open ended questions for Of Mice and Men.

2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite?
Discussions – follow up questions (is that a button?)

3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects?
We use the opinions of kids from another town of totally different demographics to help us understand characters of different demographics.

4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, “Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!”
When we went down to the computer lab as a class and we couldn’t wait to see what our “Plainfield friends” had responded.

5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you?
Use me more — I’m awesome!

My focus here will be working with schools and districts to help them get the most out of Wikispaces. Looking forward to collaborating and engaging with you all!

1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do:
The Fugleflicks wiki has been a place to make resources available for art teachers. It began as a way to post my conference presentation resources when I talked about making movies with students. Then when art teachers began asking where to find our Fugleflicks, Student-Created Art-Related movies, I put together a rough index on the wiki and referred them back there again.

Then when teachers asked me how to create animation or green screen effects in movies I began a tutorial on the wiki to show them my tricks. I was able to add screencast tutorials, files they can download to practice with, and example movies. When teachers asked for advice on how to manage students for collaborative movie-making experiences, I added my advice on the wiki as well. Then when stories started coming in from teachers about how their students love to sing along with our Fugleflicks, I decided to encourage this with karaoke pages complete with audio tracks and lyrics.

Then when I heard that you can embed a glog into a wiki (boy does that sound nerdy) I had to try too. See it here.

During the summer I was asked to teach an animation workshop so the wiki grew again. This page includes everything I needed to help my students animate an original superhero story.

I also have a (shhhh) secret in progress page for my students where I post the song lyrics, audio tracks, storyboards, or anything they may want access to at home to prepare for movie-making at school.

2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite?
I love that I can embed video, audio, and attach files for others to download. I have been able to do so much with very little training with wikispaces.com to create a site that gives other art teachers access to my resources all in one location.

3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects?
My Favorite Wiki was designed for a collaborative art project: A Brush with Fame based on the travels of the award-winning brush actor, Young Sloppy Brush. He traveled to an art teacher’s classroom for one week to meet all the students and share his inspiring Fugleflick video and message about caring for paintbrushes. His wiki housed photos from his travels across the country, a google map that showed updates as he arrived in his next destination, his movie page with song lyrics and a karaoke version for singing along, a google schedule, a poster, and a history page to learn about why this brush was truly wonderful. Tragically YSB’s travels ended and he went missing mid school year. My students posted a video to help cope with the loss. We are still looking for information about his whereabouts.

4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, “Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!”
When I’m asked the same questions over and over again, the wikis give me a place to answer them and send the link.

I have many wikis now and they are all about sharing resources for educators. I love that I don’t need to send an email with link after link of references, but one link to a well thought out page of references. Here are some examples:

• Ideas for integrating technology in art
• List of tech equipment for the art room
• Ideas for using an interactive whiteboard in art class
• A list of great iPad/iPod apps for art education (co-authored by Suzanne Tiedemann, Theresa Gillespie)

5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you?
My many wikis: Fugleflicks, Fuglevision, Art is Interactive, Young Sloppy Brush, and iPads in Art, would all shout out in unison, “Please organize!”

It’s true, I would have to agree with them. Wikis are very easy to start and add to. So I’ve let mine just grow and grow. So, it would be nice if things were tidied up a bit so the resources can be found quicker.

But, for the most part, the wikis are happy to be up and running, they enjoy being of use, and complain very little. :)

Events are an easy way to automate calendar-related actions: for example, you could set a due date that locks a Project, or send out automated announcements.

Take a look:

If you’ve been waiting for a feature like this, here’s how you can get started:

1. Go to Projects in the action menu.
2. Locate the Project you want to add an Event to, and click the number in the Events column.
3. Click the New Event button.
4. Enter your event information.
5. Click Create.

…and you can learn more on our new Events help page.

Today, I want to take a look at an old-school approach to citing sources: footnotes.

How does it work?

1. Edit your page.
2. Place the cursor where you would like the citation to appear, usually at the end of a sentence or just after a quote or technical term.
3. Click the Widget button in the editor toolbar.
4. From the Wikispaces menu, select Reference.
5. Click Embed Reference Marker.
6. In the new box that has appeared at the bottom of your page, type the citation information. You can use the buttons in the toolbar to format the text.
7. Scroll back up to continue editing the page.
8. Save the page when you’re done.

Once the page has been saved, you’ll see a small, numbered, superscript link in your body text to the citation you just added. At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a list of your sources, with links to the portion of the text that cites them.

When you edit the page again, just scroll to the bottom to make changes to the contents of your footnotes.

Why are footnotes called “references”?
“Footnotes,” by definition, go at the bottom of a page. But the references on your wiki page can go anywhere you want to put them.

For example, you might want to add a reflection area to the bottom of a research paper. If you were looking at the paper itself, it might be confusing to scroll past the reflection to check the sources. In the same way, it might be distracting to see a list of sources tacked on to the end of the reflection when they really belong to the paper above.

In this example, you would want to place your reference section in between the paper itself and the reflections below:

1. Edit your page.
2. Place the cursor where you would like the list of references to appear, preferably on its own line.
3. Click the Widget button in the editor toolbar.
4. From the Wikispaces menu, select Reference.
5. Click Embed Reference Text.
6. You will see a tag on your wiki page that says “<references/>”.
7. Save the page.

Now you’ll see your citations listed between two separate sections of content.

How do I format citations?
Well, that’s a tricky question. Different institutions recommend different standards for formatting citations. Ask your school or teacher if there is a standard format you should be following — they might have a prepared sheet or Web site that outlines the standards they prefer.

Or you might look it up in a style guide. The MLA Style Manual, currently in its third edition, is very popular for academic writing. The Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association are two of the other most widely used style guides.

Which is why we created our brand-new YouTube channel for all our video tours and instructional videos. Not only because it gives us a handy place to share tips and instructions that might be too confusing to describe in just words, but because it lets you, our users, share these videos with your members.

Take a look! And if you find something you like, then go right ahead and embed it in your own wiki.

Here’s a video to show you how it’s done:

Get more videos at http://www.youtube.com/wikispacesvideos.

Have a suggestion for a video you’d like to see or share? Leave a comment below and we’ll add it to the list.

1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do:
Our design and writing team for Expedition Earth and Beyond (EEAB) was originally composed of four educators representing three states along with the project director from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. Since the members of the team lived in different parts of the country, most of our project development was conducted remotely via conference calls and email. As lessons and activities were written and evolved through multiple revisions, the need for a collaborative online workspace became apparent. We chose Wikispaces.com and the use of a wiki to meet that need. The project wiki became a highly useful website on which to store and review documents, images, PowerPoint presentations, and even video clips. When we eventually looked for an online tool for teams of students to participate in the project, a wiki was an obvious choice. We created a template that follows the process of scientific research; and we embed it into the new wiki that we create for each student team that chooses to participate in EEAB.

2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite?
One of the special features of Expedition Earth and Beyond is the opportunity for each team of students engaged in a research project to be assigned an online mentor. The mentor is typically a scientist at the Johnson Space Center — a real “rocket scientist.” The mentor can follow the progress of the student team on the team wiki and communicate with the students through the discussion tool. This feature provides a wonderful opportunity for the exchange of ideas, questions, and advice between the students and their assigned mentor, and all communication is done in the public arena of the wiki discussion board. We have also created a teacher wiki for the purpose of sharing ideas and resources between different teachers who are guiding students through the EEAB project.

3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects?
The goal of Expedition Earth and Beyond is to engage students in grades 5 through 12 in the actual process of scientific research. The focus of their research is Earth System Science, and their main source of data comes from astronaut photography — images of Earth features captured by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other manned spacecraft. Thousands of these images are now archived and available online through the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Students working in teams use their own wikis as collaborative tools to conduct and share their research about specific Earth features. Their research often involves looking for visible changes to specific features by comparing astronaut images taken of the same locations over time. An added bonus of the project is the opportunity to request new images to be captured by astronauts aboard ISS to assist the students in their research.

4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, “Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!”
One memorable moment was when a class of eighth grade students was quietly engaged in their EEAB project work and the first message from their assigned NASA mentor arrived. A student suddenly yelled out, “We have a mentor, we have a mentor!” and the rest of the students immediately turned their attention to the wiki’s discussion board to read the mentor’s introduction. It was very rewarding to see and hear their excitement upon making the initial contact with their own mentor from NASA.

5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you?
I think that our wiki would recognize that our design and development team has worked very hard at creating a rewarding experience, and that through the collaborative tool of a wiki, teachers and students can together experience the excitement of real scientific research.

But, one day, your finger slips, and you delete your carefully crafted home page. Oh no! What can you do now?

Well, not to worry. If you are the organizer of the wiki, you can restore any deleted pages or files from the Recycle Bin.

Where can I find it?
Just go to Manage Wiki and click on the Recycle Bin icon under Content. There you will see a list of all the pages and files that have been deleted in the past 30 days. And, if you are an organizer of that wiki, you can restore them to their rightful place.

How does it work?
Simply check the boxes for the pages or files you want back, and click the Restore button.

If you’ve deleted a lot of things lately, you can narrow it down with the Search box, or Filter by Type (pages, files, or page templates).

And if there are several versions of that page or file in the Recycle Bin, you can always look at the timestamp to see when it was deleted, so you know you’re restoring the right version. For example, let’s say I deleted my homepage yesterday, then tried to rebuild it this morning. But I couldn’t get it quite right so, after a frustrating half hour, I deleted the new homepage. Once I go to my recycle bin, there will be two pages called “Home.” I just select the one with yesterday’s date, and click Restore.

How do I permanently delete items in the Recycle Bin?
You don’t have to do anything. Items in the Recycle Bin will be automatically deleted after 30 days. And items in the Recycle Bin are regarded as deleted, so they will not show up in search engine results.

That being said, be aware that it sometimes takes Google and other search engines a couple of weeks to clear their cache. Once they have cleared their cache, though, the material should stop showing up in a Google search. And always remember to be responsible about items you add to a wiki — especially wikis that are visible to the public. You can learn more about your permission options here.

Why can’t I see the Recycle Bin?
Only wiki organizers have access to the Recycle Bin. If you can’t see it or can’t restore pages and files, you are either not logged in as organizer, or you do not have organizer privileges for that wiki. Make sure you are logged in and contact the wiki organizer to restore the page or file.