At Wikispaces, we are constantly improving our site and striving to create a better experience for you. Although we do carefully think through our changes, we don’t always know that they’re effective unless we see them in action. Watching people use our site is essential – it shows us how we can improve.

Currently, we are looking for people to visit our office and help us test our site. Your input is incredibly valuable to our process.

Let us design for you! Each of our testers will get a free year of Super service for a wiki of their choice.

Interested? Email us at help@wikispaces.com. Let us know a little about your experience level with Wikispaces (beginner, intermediate, advanced). You will need to be able to come to our office in San Francisco for about 1 hour during business hours.

You can say good-bye to the hassle of removing one member from your wiki at a time. Wikispaces now allows you to administer members on your wiki in bulk!



As an educator preparing for the new semester, you can easily remove your previous students from your wiki before adding new students. Or as the organizer of a growing wiki, you can quickly promote a new round of organizers to help you manage your work.

You can now take advantage of bulk management when:

• Removing members from your wiki
• Promoting or demoting members or organizers on your wiki
• Approving pending membership requests

To use these new features, log in as your wiki’s organizer, go to “Manage Wiki” and then to your “Members” page.

This month, we encourage you to check out three award-winning educational wikis on Wikispaces. These wikis have been used to interact with schools from around the world, share classroom activity, and turn online class notes into end-of-year exams. They’re great examples of how wikis can be used to create engaging learning experiences.

Below are the winner and runners-up of the Edublogs Best Educational Wikis of 2009:

Greetings From The World

Arjana Blazic’s wiki bridges different cultures and continents by allowing educators and students to share their stories and cultures with others. Using tools like Glogster, students from around the world interact with their peers through images, videos, and text.

Arjana loves using Wikispaces for this project: “Of all the Web 2.0 tools that I’ve learned about, I love Wikispaces the most because it conveys the true essence of Web 2.0 – collaboration! It’s amazing how easily we can work with students and teachers from all parts of the world…What’s more, even teachers that aren’t tech-savvy can easily use it and keep it running smoothly.”

Soar 2 New Heights

Katie Heissenbuttel created this wiki for her fourth grade classroom. Over the past year, Katie has enjoyed watching her students’ discussions develop. Initially, students only answered Katie’s questions on the wiki but they soon began to comment and respond to their peers’ postings.

As you visit the wiki, you’ll find student podcasts covering recent news events and individual pages showcasing each student’s work. Katie’s students are always excited to share their latest projects with their parents and parents really love the page of upcoming homework assignments. It’s a great example of how a wiki can transform learning into a community process.

HUMS3001: Censorship and Responsibility

Ben Miller, a teacher at the University of New South Wales, wanted his students to build learning materials for his course. He decided a wiki was the best platform to capture the group’s work over the semester. Ben chose to create his wiki on UNSW’s Wikispaces Private Label site as it gave his students a university-branded environment for their academic work.

Students loved the wiki and after several weeks, were building most of the content for the site – summarizing theories on free speech, arguing their viewpoints, and highlighting censorship cases that they wanted to further explore. The final product was a rich body of knowledge that helped the students prepare for their end-of-year exam. We encourage you to check out this wiki and listen to Ben’s discussion about his wiki project.

Did you know that with Wikispaces Private Label you can force all your wikis to use SSL or prevent your users from changing their usernames?

Force All Wikis to Use SSL Encryption
As site administrator for your company’s Private Label site, you want to ensure that all of the content on your intranet is secure. You’ve set your site permissions to private and now you want to go that extra step and make sure that all traffic between your computers and our servers is encrypted. You can do this by forcing all wikis on your site to use SSL encryption.

To get started, you need to first enable SSL encryption on your site. You can do this by purchasing a wildcard SSL certificate. For more information, go to “Site Administration,” the “Settings” tab, and then “Advanced Tools,” or send us an e-mail. Once you have SSL set up, return to the “Advanced Tools” page and set “Force SSL” to “Yes.” All traffic between your site and our servers will then automatically be encrypted.

Prevent User Renames
As the Private Label site administrator at your K-12 school, you want to easily manage your thousands of student accounts. This might mean maintaining usernames based on grade level and classroom, and preventing students from renaming their accounts.

You can do this by going to “Site Administration,” the “Settings” tab, and then “Users and Privacy.” Here you simply deselect “Allow User Account Renaming.” With this new setting, only administrators will be able to change usernames on the site.

Try out these features and let us know what you think. And if you ever have suggestions for other security or control features you’d like to see, please e-mail us at help@wikispaces.com.

We recently released a new bulk administration tool to help you easily manage users and wikis on your Wikispaces Private Label site.

Our latest Private Label feature was designed to save you time and make your life easier. As an administrator for your school’s site, you can remove all graduating student accounts with a few clicks. Or as a site administrator for your company’s Private Label, you can easily promote your new sales director to an organizer of all her wikis. Below are some of the tasks you can now handle in bulk:

• Delete, suspend, or promote users on your site
• Approve or reject pending site account or wiki membership requests
• Delete or restore wikis on your site
• Remove or promote members of a single wiki
• Remove a user from their multiple wikis

Tell us what you think about this feature or send suggestions for new Private Label features to help@wikispaces.com.

We’ve released our new theme and color picker, making it easier than ever to style your wiki. We know that our users love having the freedom to style their wikis, so we kept the flexibility but simplified the process. With our new theme and color picker, you can:

• Select themes and colors together
• Try on our pre-made color palettes
• Preview and customize your look

Why did we make these changes?

A wiki’s look is determined by both its theme and its colors, so why pick those independently from one another? We realized that themes and colors belong together on the same page, where they can be changed at the same time.

We wanted to give you even more style options, so we added pre-made color palettes. Do you like our Tatami theme, but hate the color green? It may be much more attractive in blue, teal, yellow, orange, red, or black.

Finally, we added the ability to preview both themes and colors, so you can try looks out without commitment. Try on Boxy in blue, Glass in green, Tatami in teal! We’ve also made it even easier to play around with your colors; you can preview, preview, preview until you’ve got the perfect look.

How to style your wiki

To use our new theme and color picker, go to “Manage Wiki,” then “Look and Feel,” and finally “Themes and Colors.” Here, click on theme thumbnails to see larger screenshots and available color palettes. Once you find a theme and color palette you might like, click on the color swatch, and hit “Preview” to try it out.

If you’d like to customize your colors, you can — our color picker is still around! To use it, pick the theme you want by selecting its thumbnail, then hit “Preview and Customize.” Once you’re happy with your look, hit “Apply” to keep it.

We have some great new video tutorials available to help you get up and running with your wiki. Learn how to add images and files to your wiki, embed widgets like videos and calendars, set permissions for your wiki, and invite people to join.

Add Images and Files

Learn to upload images and documents to your wiki and share them with your collaborators.

Embed Widgets

Take advantage of all the widgets out on the Internet – videos, calendars, polls, etc. – by embedding them into your wiki.

Set Permissions

Set your desired permission levels and control who has access to view or edit your wiki.

Send Invitations

See how easy it is to send invitations and begin collaborating with your colleagues.

This month, we bring you some great examples of how non-profits are using wikis. Read on to see how wikis help these organizations reach out to their communities, manage volunteers, create resources, and more.

CARE

CARE is a global non-profit working to fight poverty. They use Wikispaces Private Label as a platform for members to communicate, collaborate, and share best practices. They have many wikis on their site, including:

• A knowledge café where individuals share best practices for engaging the cultures and communities in which they work
• A wiki where they train their global members and volunteers in emergency preparedness and response
• Various wikis designed by groups of employees interested in bringing new capacities to the organization
• Wikis devoted to strategic planning, improving their organization, and measuring the impact of their various projects and initiatives

With Wikispaces Private Label, CARE has built an active community where members can find resources, develop skills, and improve the long-term health of the organization.

Communities Connect Network

Based in Washington State, Communities Connect Network (CCN) is focused on developing technical resources and skills in low-income and under-served regions of the state. CCN supports and trains hundreds of community organizations to achieve their program goals with the use of technology. Participants use the wiki to tell their stories, share documents and training resources, collaborate, and network with others doing similar work.

The Earth Charter Initiative

The Earth Charter Initiative (ECI) works to build a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. Their Earth Charter Youth Groups are designed to bring together youths and adults from diverse backgrounds to tackle issues in their communities. Currently, there are about 60 official groups in over 30 countries. They use their wiki to promote each group, share minutes and activity reports, and upload resources and documents.

Wikispaces is an effective way for the ECI to help new groups get started, support existing groups in their day-to-day operations, and guide them as they implement projects in their communities. Jaana Laitinen, the International Youth Facilitator at the Earth Charter Initiative, loves how easy Wikispaces has made coordinating their global communities: “Wikispaces is perfect!…We use the wiki as a place to manage the creation of new groups. It serves as an application form for interested groups to sign-up, a space for us to review their applications, and finally as profile pages for each new group. For us the wiki is a great tool that we highly recommend to others.”

Rt. 1 Day Center

The Rt. 1 Day Center, a homeless center in Columbia, Maryland, uses their wiki to coordinate volunteers for their meals, showers, laundry and social services. More than 40 churches in the area partner with the center, volunteering for a day’s service once a month. The wiki is the community hub where volunteers sign-up, check what’s been happening at the center, and inform next-day volunteers about needed food and supplies.

Skills Standards for the Woodworking Industry

Until recently, the woodworking industry was one of the few industries left without standards to help evaluate, educate and compensate their workforce. A group of woodworking professionals from across the industry used Wikispaces to compile a set of skills standards. Wikispaces enabled them to rewrite the standards for 33 woodworking tools with only a single face-to-face meeting. The work they did on the wiki over a two year period was approved by the Woodwork Career Alliance of North America [WCANA] and released in July 2009 as a 134 page manual for the field.

For all of you looking for a collaborative platform for your school, company, or organization, we encourage you to join us tomorrow, November 19 at 10am PST, for our Wikispaces Private Label Demo Webinar.

It will be a great opportunity to learn about our high-end product and see how to create and manage your own wiki environment. You’ll learn to setup your site, set permissions for members, manage your user accounts and wikis, and more.

To register for this webinar, visit:

http://wikispacespltraining0911-6.eventbrite.com

Join us today, November 18 at 12pm PST for our November Education Webinar. We’ll be joined by Jimbo Lamb, a math educator from Pennsylvania who has been using wikis for several years.

Jimbo’s wiki is an integrated part of his classroom. Students have access to course information, podcasts that review basic concepts, online quizzes that test their knowledge, and practice questions that help prepare them for their standardized tests. Jimbo uses the technology to engage students in the learning process, from video projects on the use of quadratics in the real world to sending a text to get the latest homework assignment. Whether you’re a math teacher or not, we think you’ll get a lot out of Jimbo’s wiki.

Register for the event at:

http://wikispacesineducation0911-2.eventbrite.com/