WikiSpaces

Our class is using wikispaces as a way to share content and build a class website. Wikispaces has the goal of providing online space that is simple to use, supports a community of contributors, is open and useable for everyone, and like most companies, they also have the goal to provide helpful  and "crazy amazing" customer service.

Wikispaces can designed to fulfill many functions: a knowledge resource, a safe place for social networking, a place for collaborative and project based learning, a space for online or remote learning; it also has classroom management features. Editing pages is fairly straightforward. At the top of each page that you create there is an editing bar like any word processor. There are also widgets that allow you to add additional content and increase the functionality of the pages, for example you can add a calendar, polls, or maps. Our class site is exists to host instructional pages on Web 2.0 tools.Each tool has a separate student constructed page and everyone edits the homepage. Typically signing up is by email but teachers can sign students up who don't have emails making wikispaces good for students in younger grade.

Overall this has worked well with one problem when more that on e person is working on a page things get a bit complicated. You have to be careful when you exit and save that you don't discard changes that the other person has made/is making. In this way wikispaces is not as good as Google docs, where multiple people can work at once and changes are saved all the time.

I will need to spend some more time with wikispaces to see if it is a tool that I want to use. There are a lot of ways to collaborate online and some of the features overlap with the standard course management system that is already in place. However, it is user friendly and has a lot of  features.

Here is a webinar on creating wikispaces.