Organization Bar

Wikispaces Projects are spaces for your students to work in that you can share with only those people you want to be involved. Students can work together in their own space, you can monitor and manage each project, and now, with Classroom, you can use our new Assessment feature to see how students in each Project are doing. Let’s walk you through how to get a Project up and running.

To get started, once you’re in your Wikispaces Classroom, you can either create a Project directly on the Calendar, or go to the Projects link on the top Organizational Bar and start from there. The advantage of starting your Project on your Calendar is 1) the Project will show up for you and your students on the News Feed and 2) you can assign start dates and end dates as you create your Project. You’ll know you’re creating a Project because of the small Project icon on the top right of your post. Just like any other News Feed item, you can also send an email about it to all your students and disable comments if you like. Allowing comments however means that students can discuss and ask questions about the Project right from the News Feed.

Starting a Project

Once you click Create, you’ll be taken to the Project page. You’ll see your class list on the right, and you’ll be prompted to create Teams. Each team will have their own area to work in, with their own permissions. Once you create Teams, you can either drag and drop students to assign them to Teams or upload a .csv file that has student usernames in one column and the Team you want each student in in the other. You can also Assign Randomly and try your luck with groupings. If there are some pairings that simply won’t work, you can just drag them into a different box. Problem solved!

Creating Teams

Assigning Members

Once your Teams are set, you can also set their Permissions. Do this one by one (by clicking on the lock that says “Private,” which is the default setting,) or click “Set All Permissions” at the bottom to set them in one fell swoop. You can also click on the Calendar to track events and due dates for each individual project.

Permissions

If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute.

Project Home Page

When you click on each individual team, you’ll be taken to that team’s Home Page. You’ll see the pages in that team’s Project listed, and you can track recent changes and any other Pages or Files the Team members have added.

Pages

If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click “Projects.” The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive.

Project List

If a student in the Project looks at their homepage, they will see the Projects they’re in and no one else’s. We hope this makes it dead-easy for students to keep track of their work and contribute.

If you want to see all Projects again at a glance, simply go back to your orange Organization Bar and click “Projects.” The entire list will pop up, showing members, permissions, and the ability to delete or archive.

Assessment

Every good project needs a way for the teacher to quickly monitor what’s going on, and our Assessment tool is a great way to do just that. If you click “Projects” inside your Assessments tool, each of your Projects will display showing recent activity, both reading and writing. For now, you can only filter by the last 30 minutes, but soon you’ll be able to view activity over time, making for incredible opportunities for formative assessment. Imagine being able to tell the “Cs through Unn” team what an awesome job they’re doing, and giving the “He through Ne” team a nudge and the support they need to succeed– all within the same class period.

The sky really is the limit when you set up Projects in your classroom. They can be small assignments, large, several month-long projects, or year-long projects, like a space for weekly writing, an ePortfolio, or individual projects. We can’t wait to hear how you use them.

Stay tuned this week as we cover more about the Assessment tool, and do join us for our online Wikispaces Classroom Office Hours and Tour next Tuesday at 4PM Sydney, Australia time! Also feel free to share your classroom here or on Twitter with the #wclassroom hashtag to enter our contest.

Starting with your Existing Site

We know many of our users have amazing Wikispaces.com and Wikispaces Private Label sites already set up and running highly effectively. The first step to trying out Wikispaces Classroom is going into your Settings and switching it to Classroom mode. Remember one you switch, Settings will be up top on your Organizer Bar.

Basic Wikispaces Page

Now you’ll notice a few things change. First your theme will be standardized. For the moment, all Wikispaces Classrooms have this simple theme so that we can guarantee a really good user experience and you and your students can focus on your work.

To change to Classroom, simply go to Settings.

None of your data will be lost in the change and you can always change back. We hope you’ll love the new environment, though, and look forward to any feedback you have that will help us make the transition even easier.

Preparing Your Students

While many of your students may be tech-savvy, they’ll still need to learn the norms of your online classroom to maximize their learning time on the site. The first thing you’ll need to do, of course, is get them there! If you don’t already have accounts for students, you can easily create them under Settings-User Creator.

Make your student accounts with User Creator.

Since Wikispaces Classroom is a social environment, we encourage teachers to have students create avatars that represent themselves the first day. There are many fun avatar creators out there, like the Simpsons Ride creator we used, and you can find one suitable for your class with a quick online search for “avatar creator.”

To get started, simply have your students click on their username in the top right of the page and then click on Settings. After that, they can click “Change picture” to upload their picture. Teachers, don’t forget to make one for yourself! It all adds to the creation of motivation and community in your Wikispaces Classroom.

Easily add a picture to your profile.

Setting Up Your Newsfeed

Last week, we highlighted how the Newsfeed works– it’s the new homepage for your Wikispaces Classroom. Now that your students are created and have avatars, you’re ready to give them something to do!

Starting a Discussion is easy– think of a question you’d like the whole class to respond to. It could be homework and something they respond to before coming into class, or perhaps it’s a mid-class break where you’d like to collect all of their feedback. Whatever the question, post it and watch your students easily respond! All Discussions on the News Feed continue to aggregate here, so you can start new ones, go back to old, and Monitor or Lock your posts. Best of all, students can pose their own questions for the class, and then see their classmates’ thoughts on their questions.

Setting up norms with your Newsfeed.

The next step is to plan for your Discussions– when will you post, when will students be expected to post, and what are acceptable comments? We have seen Wikispaces teachers create wonderful lessons for preparing students to collaboratively write and can’t wait to hear how you prepare them for the News Feed. A good rule of thumb is to allow for practice and modeling of great comments and potentially allowing for online participation to figure into your assessments.

We hope these are helpful for your first steps into Wikispaces Classroom– the easiest part is just switching it on in Settings. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be highlighting other ways to get started– stay tuned for Projects!

Please watch more on our archived Wikispaces Classroom Demo and Tour or sign up for an upcoming live tour. Once you make your Classroom, we’d love it if you’d join our #wclassroom Challenge on Twitter! Simply tweet out your Classroom and how you’re using it with #wclassroom. Don’t have Twitter? Comment below.

1. Briefly describe your group, your wiki, and what you use it to do:
CBCL Limited provides excellence in engineering and related services in Atlantic Canada, headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We use wikis to set up project-specific websites serving primarily as knowledge bases, communication platforms and progress-tracking tools.

This wiki is used to manage a large environmental monitoring project. We take thousands of samples per year all across the province. The wiki allows us to keep track of our progress and provides essential information to staff in the field.

2. Besides the Edit button, which wiki feature is your favorite?
We love the ability to easily integrate content from services such as Google Earth and Picasa. This provides functionality and a rich experience to our users.

3. What is one way you’re using wikis and other web 2.0 tools in your projects?
Technologists returning from field work upload their GPS tracks, photographs and other information to the wiki to report their progress to project managers and clients almost in real-time.

4. Tell us about a particular moment that made you say, “Aha! THIS is why I use wikis!”
I was in the field one day getting ready to launch a boat to take samples. At that time, strong winds were picking up from the southwest and I had to abandon my planned sampling run. I was able to consult the wiki to find a nearby and sheltered sampling area. The wiki told me that this area had not been sampled previously and allowed me to download the location of sampling stations to my iPad. That way, it saved my schedule and money.

5. If you could ask it, what do you think your wiki would say about you?
“Your pages may not be the most beautiful or fancy, but they sure get a lot of use!”

There are many different ways for a teacher to organize their digital classroom these days, from the bare minimum to intricate learning management systems. With Wikispaces Classroom, we wanted to give you what you love about Wikispaces — its simplicity and ease of use — along with an extra layer of management for the classroom that we hope you’ll find equally simple, for you and students alike. This first thing you’ll notice is the overall theme change — there is a standard background, settings bar, and navigation bar to make it easy for your students to focus on their work and for you to focus on them.

Organizer Bar

The Organizer Bar lets you access Members, Settings, Projects, and Assessments.

We’ve taken the settings you most care about as a teacher and put them at the top of each Wikispaces Classroom page so you can access these controls whenever you need them. These used to exist in the right-hand navigation bar, now you can access the most important aspects of managing your wiki – Members, Projects, Assessment, and Settings in a way that is separate from your pages. And when students log in, they don’t see this bar, meaning they can just focus on the Pages and Projects they are working on.

Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar has always been the hub for access to all of your Wiki pages. In Wikispaces Classroom, we’ve pared it down to be just what you need. A link to your News Feed will always be on top as the central location for up-to-the-minute information on your wiki. Below that, you’ll see a collection of your Pages, which you can now organize even more. Just click and drag up and down to reorder, or click “Edit Navigation” to turn off “All Pages” and use Tags instead. However you use it, you’ll notice it’s designed to help you focus on just your important Pages.

The Navigation Bar now only features News Feed, Pages, and Tags.

Settings
We’ve taken all the functionality of the old Manage Wiki area and renamed it Settings with a whole new look and feel that’s cleaner and more intuitive. Not only do you access it on the top Organizer Bar, but now you can quickly move between each section of the Settings area from one page. We think you’ll find it much simpler to use.

Settings is now more streamlined and easier to use.

We can’t wait to see how you and your students use Wikispaces Classroom, and we think these changes add up to a whole new experience that allows you to focus on engaging your students and improving their outcomes. Learn more about Wikispaces Classroom at one of our upcoming webinar tours, and join our Twitter #wclassroom Challenge online this month, sharing your Wikispaces Classroom with the world. Simply Tweet a link to your site with #wclassroom today.

As an organizer of your Classroom, you have an orange bar along the top of your wiki that students don’t. It easily allows you to access Members, Projects, Settings and Assessment.

Formative Assessment

The first thing you’ll see when you click Assessment, is your Engagement page. Each of your students appears on the Engagement page, and you get an accurate and real-time reading of their activity on the wiki. You’ll be able to monitor their level of contribution, see whether they are reading or writing, and give them support when and where it’s needed. The graphs are constantly refreshing, so you can stay on track even in the middle of your lesson. Try it on your iPad. When you start your writing lesson, and dispatch your students to work on their research with each other, you can walk around the class and see their activity. Differentiation has never been easier.

An easy key helps you read the engagement graph.

The circles next to each name help you quickly identify students who are extremely active, online doing moderate work, or not online at all. The graphs for each student highlight if they are online viewing a wiki (the thick green line), typing characters into a wiki (the thick black bars), or have recently saved a new page version (red dots). At a quick glance, you can see who in your class might be having a slow start and immediately provide the support or encouragement they need.

Follow your students’ engagement by student or project.

While seeing which students are active is good, being able to see specific work done by a student is even better. By clicking on the one of the red dots, you’ll pull up the actual page edit the student did, allowing you to see any deletions and insertions and gauge their understanding of the assignment. Directly from here, you can insert comments and discussion posts to encourage the student and provide feedback.

Click on the graph to view real-time page edits from students.

You can monitor engagement by user or by Project. By switching to Project View, you can glance at activity by each individual team, helping you spot check a struggling group and provide assistance. Use the Filter dropdown to choose a specific project quickly.

View engagement by projects.

You can also choose the time increment right up on top so you can decide at what level you’d like to assess your students. The more recent the assessment, the more formative your use of it can be. Looking back over time allows you and your students to prepare for summative assessments and parent/teacher and student-led conferences.

Best of all, our Formative Assessment feature works great on mobile devices, allowing you to track this information while on the go in your room, not shackled to your desk. We know 21st century educators are an active bunch, moving about their classrooms as students collaborate with each other. Now you can keep tabs on up-to-the-minute activity by keeping your tablet or phone on the Engagement page and noting if anyone needs your help.

Sign up for one of our live tours, happening once a week, to learn more.

News Feed

We know that comments, messages, and discussions can sometimes get lost in the shuffle of all of your great wiki pages. The News Feed is your Classroom Homepage and has some helpful features to keep you and your students on track in a simple and engaging way. This is a stream of information from you and all students on your Wiki, including Discussions, Projects, and Events. Students can reply on each thread, making for easy and instant communication. You can even enable Email Notifications to stay on top of things as soon as possible.

Projects

Projects are a great feature that have been a part of Wikispaces for a while, and with the Wikispaces Classroom News Feed, we think it will be even simpler for you to create and manage them. Directly from the News Feed, you can choose “Project,” enter a description, and a start date and an end date, and then you are immediately taken to create a Project.

The Projects homepage puts all of your projects in one place to organize.

Looking for ideas? Think of anything in your class that you would assign your students, either individually or collaboratively– a Literature Circle Book Group, a research page for a writing project — and you can create it from the News Feed and track its progress from the Projects menu.

Best of all, from the News Feed, you can choose who to direct a Discussion to by Project, making it easy for you to send information to each group. This is a great way to have one Wiki for your course, but different Teams for each of your classes and/or projects and communicate with them separately.

Events and Calendar

Check out the Calendar Feature, top and center, highlighting upcoming Assignments and Events that you plan for students. In addition to Discussions and Projects, you now can easily create Events on the News Feed. Events then appear on the Calendar tool, which includes a list of the next few upcoming Events and Projects as well as a traditional calender view. The Calendar is particular to each student, so they’ll only see items that are applicable to them.

The Calendar makes it easy to keep track of assignments.

And of course, your regular wiki Pages are still there, on the top right, for you to make classroom subject-based wikis and resources just like before.

Want to get started? Simply choose “Wikispaces Classroom” when you create a new wiki, or go to “Settings” and change your Wiki Type to Classroom to convert your current wiki.

Stay tuned this week as we highlight more Wikispaces Classroom news and features, and register for a live webinar tour here.

Wikispaces Classroom is a brand new product from the Wikispaces team entirely and exclusively for teachers and students.

Over the years we’ve distilled what we believe and do into one simple thing: help teachers help students. And Wikispaces Classroom is our attempt to take that to the next level.

When we ask ourselves, our users, and our customers, what we can do to better help teachers help their students, the message always comes down to three things: Keep it simple. Help teachers and students engage deeply. Help teachers improve student outcomes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Simplicity. Wikispaces was built to help people work together. All kinds of people, in all kinds of contexts. Over the years we made it easier and easier for teachers and students to use Wikispaces but there were always parts of Wikispaces that weren’t designed for the classroom and frankly, got in the way. In Wikispaces Classroom, all that is gone. It’s streamlined and focused, it puts everything you need to manage your classroom right up front, and it gets everything you don’t need right out of the way.

Engagement. Wikispaces has always been about engaging teachers and students in meaningful activity and communication in and around the learning process. For Wikispaces Classroom we’ve designed an entirely new way to manage and talk about everything that goes on in our class. Featuring a modern newsfeed, and a simple way to manage assignments, announcements, events, and all of your resources and work, it’s everything you and your students love about social networking but private, in your classroom, and integrated with your day to day work.

Improve Outcomes. We know that the key to improving student outcomes, however you define them, is to help teachers understand what is happening with each student every day, so that they can spend their time helping each student the way that student needs to be helped. Wikispaces has always had an enormous amount of data about what students are doing, and how they are doing, under the hood, and so we just decided to give that data to teachers in a way they can actually use. In formal terms, it’s formative assessment. In our terms, its our way of making the lives of teachers easier, and helping them help more kids, more efficiently, and more effectively.

And of course, Wikispaces Classroom is free for teachers and students.

You can create a new Wikispaces Classroom now, or convert an existing wiki to Wikispaces Classroom in your Settings area.

We’ll be posting more detail every day this week, so stay tuned, and let us know what you think. We’ll be hosting weekly webinar tours; sign up here.

James will also be kicking off Thursday’s events with a breakfast presentation, “Ed-Tech Startups: Lost in the Desert?” He’ll be digging into the unique challenges faced by education startups and look at how founders, investors, and most importantly students and teachers can play a part in building sustainable companies.

Whether or not you’re attending SLOAN-C, our paper “How to Succeed in Ed-Technology” gives you the background about how we at Wikispaces think about the education startup world.

If you’d like to meet up please drop us a note at help@wikispaces.com.

Comments
We found that while many users loved our comment feature, they sometimes missed when new comments were added to a page. In an effort to make them easier to use, we will be showing comments more prominently on the right side of all pages. Also, since it has become obvious to us that commenting is more about editing pages than discussing them, we are changing the way we manage commenting permissions.

Comments will always appear so you don’t miss them.

Commenting permissions will follow the page edit permissions — if a user has permission to edit, they will be able to comment. If they don’t have permission to edit, they will not.

This also applies to custom page permissions and locking pages.

Please note that this means that if you have a page set to allow discussions but not edits, users will lose the permission to add comments when we make this change. And if you have a page set to allow edits but not discussions, users will gain the permission to comment on that page. We do not recommend making any changes ahead of time but you may need to answer user questions as they arise after this change.

Manage Wiki
The Manage Wiki area is getting a visual overhaul. It will be called Settings, and we will no longer show the link to non-organizers, making your site cleaner for your users.

A new “Settings” will replace “Manage Wiki.”

Discussions
We are changing the way discussions look at the thread level. The new look is more modern and cool and part of some new stuff we’re developing.

Discussions are easier to reply to, lock, and monitor.

Navigation Bar
We are changing the way the navigation bar works on the side of your wikis. In the past you could edit the custom navigation bar inline. Now, you’ll need to click “edit navigation” to add new navigation sections, reorder links, or delete sections. Only organizers can edit the custom navigation now, along with all other “Content Manager” pages. We found people making a lot of accidental navigation bar edits so hopefully this will clear that up.

These changes will be going live within the next two weeks. We’d love to hear what you think of the new changes. Share with us below or on Twitter.