Join us for our upcoming webinar on October 13 at 4pm PDT and see how Wikispaces Private Label is being used in Australia’s post-secondary TAFE-NSW Western Sydney Institute.

Western Sydney Institute (WSI) is a member of Australia’s Technical and Further Education institutes – the largest network for vocational training in Australia. WSI has been using Wikispaces Private Label since the beginning of 2008 and has hundreds of wikis and thousands of members on their site. Beth Hobbs, Kerrie Street, and several of their educators will speak about their Private Label site and how they are using it to enhance collaborative learning in their on-site and distance learning courses.

To join us for the event, you can register at:

http://wikispacesprivatelabel0910-6.eventbrite.com

We hope to see you there.

This Saturday morning we’ll be taking Wikispaces offline for maintenance at 9 AM PDT (what’s that in my time zone?). We’re blocking out an hour for the work we’ll be doing, though we hope to be done more quickly.

As always, we keep track of maintenance happenings and problems with the service at an off-site status page: http://status.wikispaces.com/

We’ll post updates there while our work is underway.

This month, we want to introduce you to BOSCO, an organization using wikis and technology to help give the isolated and war-affected people of Northern Uganda a voice in the global community. BOSCO was founded three years ago by Gus Zuehlke, a Catholic minister from Indiana, after he visited several Internally Displaced Persons camps in Northern Uganda. These individuals were cut off from an increasingly connected world, which hampered their ability to build a prosperous future for themselves. BOSCO is training them to use technology to tell their stories, articulate the problems they face, design solutions for these problems, and invite global collaborators to help.

With the support of organizations like HorizonT3000, UNICEF, Inveneo, the University of Notre Dame and Wikispaces, BOSCO overcame initial logistical problems and got their organization operating on the ground. To start, they trained a small group to use collaborative technology. BOSCO’s Kevin Bailey describes their training process as throwing the traditional ICT curriculum out the window. “The first thing we do is get them on email, then we let them navigate our simple Intranet site which connects all BOSCO sites to a high speed internal network, useful for posting photos, blogs, and other educational content. After these groups gain competence navigating the web, we point them in the direction of our BOSCO Wikispace so that they can begin collaborating immediately.” According to Kevin, “Collaboration between previously isolated communities can help them reconcile with each other, share information, and articulate local solutions to community problems.” Because Wikispaces was so easy to use, even kids who had never seen a computer before were able to get on their wiki and share their stories.

BOSCO is now in 20 different locations and 8 Internally Displaced Persons camps in Northern Uganda. And the group they initially trained is training others. Residents in the region are posting their stories and are beginning to use the wiki to articulate solutions for their problems. These solutions include proposals for a local farming initiative, an orphan’s group, and a small music festival.

Tom Loughran, the Vice President of BOSCO and a professor at Notre Dame, is very pleased with his choice to use Wikispaces. He had used Wikispaces in his college courses, seen his students jump into it without any training, and recognized its flexibility for his work in Uganda. The service offered by Wikispaces was also an important factor. “The support and encouragement BOSCO has received from Wikispaces has been a big boost for us during these very early days of our pilot efforts.”

BOSCO is growing as more people in the Ugandan villages are trained to use the technology and more people in the global community hear their stories. We encourage you to visit their website and see their wikis yourself. We’ve provided a set of links below to get you started.

Visit BOSCO’s Wikispaces Private Label site
Read stories by a Northern Ugandan
Learn about their cultural preservation music festival
Check out their proposal for a local farming cooperative

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been making Wikispaces even more intuitive and effective for your daily work. You now have a more powerful tagging system, an easier to use File Upload tool, the ability to save your wiki pages as PDFs, and more.

According to one of our long-time users, Glenn Zucman of USC, Wikispaces’ improvements continue to impress: “I was just looking around and reflecting on all the new features since 2006. Wikispaces was really great then, and it’s so much more powerful, complete, and elegant now! Bravo!”

See for yourself. Check out each of these great new features:

• Tag Pages and Files for Easier Management
• More Easily Upload Files to Your Wiki
• Follow More Changes at Recent Changes
• Template a Wiki on Your Private Label Site
• Open Links in New Windows and Add Anchors to Your Page
• Turn Your Page or Wiki into a PDF
• Add References with the Visual Editor
• Resize Your Widgets

Like what you see? If you want to learn about upcoming improvements when they arrive, keep an eye on our Site Changes page and our blog .

You can now save and print all the hard work you do on your wiki as an elegant PDF to share with others. If you are planning a conference, collaborate with your colleagues on your wiki to put together that killer welcome pamphlet and then print it for all the participants. Or if you’re a non-profit, build training booklets on your wiki so that your international offices can print them out as a PDF to give to their volunteers.

To turn a wiki page into a PDF, go to the arrow on that page’s “page” tab. In that dropdown, click “PDF.” You can then save your page as a PDF on your computer for later or print it out right then. You can also convert your entire wiki into a PDF. To do this, go to “Manage Wiki” and “exports.” There you can set the type of export to PDF.

Produce elegant documents with our new PDF feature and take your wiki’s good looks to the streets.

Our new wiki template feature for Wikispaces Private Label lets you create wiki templates that your users can use when they create wikis on your site.

If you are creating e-portfolio wikis for each student, lower the barrier to getting started by giving each student a pre-structured wiki. Or, if you are setting up regional offices on your Private Label site, give each office a wiki pre-populated with all the necessary guidelines and documents.

To set up your wiki template,

1. Edit a wiki that you want to use as the template. Set the theme and permissions for the wiki and add any desired pages, links, or documents.
2. Go to “Site Administration” and then to the “wikis” tab.
3. From there, click “view and create templates.”
4. On this page, you can create a new template from the wiki you setup.

Now, when people create a new wiki on the site, they will have the choice to use your new template as a starting point.

If you are using wiki templates in your school or organization, we’d love to hear how. Feel free to send examples of how they are working for you along with any suggestions or feedback to help@wikispaces.com.

Our newest changes to our image and file upload tool let you more easily manage, sort, and locate your files. You can now:

• Upload your files easily with our more intuitive interface.
• Search for your files or images by name.
• Tag your files and then search for any files with that tag.

These improvements make it easier for you to organize and manage all the files and images on your wiki. You can separate files into groups and then search by group. As an educator, you can upload and tag assignments for your different classes so your students can find their own assignments easily. As a manager in a company, you can search for a specific expense report by employee and quickly find the one you need. If you haven’t uploaded a file or image recently, check out the cool new changes. Edit a page and click “Insert Images and Files” in the toolbar.

As always, we’d love your feedback on this improved feature. E-mail us at help@wikispaces.com with your comments.

Your “Recent Changes” page has a snazzy new look which allows you to better monitor and manage the activity on your wiki.

Whether you are just beginning your wiki or you’ve been actively using it for a while, Recent Changes has always been a great place to see the recent edits or discussion posts on your wiki. It lets you monitor the activity on your site, make sure you respond to a newbie’s discussion question, or get a bird’s eye view of the work happening among the ten different groups on your wiki.

With our recent improvements, you can now:

• Monitor changes to pages, files, tags, and membership on your wiki. On a Private Label site, you can also see recent wiki creations.
• More easily navigate your Recent Changes list and sort changes by type with our more intuitive design.
• Find more detail about a particular edit or post with our change summaries.

To view these changes, go to your wiki and click on “Recent Changes.” If you notice that someone has made a change to a page that you care about, you now won’t have to leave Recent Changes to see what they’ve done. Simply click on the gray text to the left of their username to view a summary of their changes. To hide this detail, click the gray text again.

Check out your Recent Changes and send us your feedback at help@wikispaces.com.

Our latest changes to the link tool will make it even easier to impress your colleagues with what your wiki can do.

You now don’t need to know any special code or tricks to have your links open in new windows. Simply edit your page and go to the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar. Whether you decide to add a link to your wiki page or to an external website, you can click the “New Window” check box to have that link open in a new page in your browser.

You can also now easily add a link to any part of your wiki page with our link and anchor feature. An anchor is an invisible marker that you can place at any point on your page. You can then link to this marker from any page on your wiki, another wiki entirely, or even another website. This is useful when you want to direct your readers to a specific section of a page.

To set an anchor:

1. Edit the page and place your cursor at the section of the page you want to add the anchor to.
2. Click the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar and go to the “Anchor” tab.
3. Enter a name for your anchor and click “Add Link.”

Your anchor is now on your page and you can link to it as many times as you’d like from wherever you like.

To link to an anchor:

1. Edit the page where you want to add the link.



2. Go to the “Insert Link” tool in the toolbar and then to the “Wiki Link” tab.
3. Type in the page name that the anchor is on and then click “Link to anchor?”
4. Type in your anchor name, add the link, and voila. You have just added a link to the exact section you want on your page.

Dive into these features, take more control over the navigation experience on your wiki, and wait for those “How did you do that?” exclamations from your friends.

Our references feature is now easy enough for anyone to use. Instead of using wikitext to cite your sources, you only need to point and click to have your references added to the page.

To add a reference note:

1. Edit your page and place your cursor where you’d like your reference marker to go.
2. Click on the “Embed Widget” tool in the toolbar.
3. Go to “Reference” and click on “Embed Reference Marker.”
4. Type in the text you’d like to appear in your footnote.
5. Save the reference and then save your page.

By default, references will appear at the bottom of the page.

1. Edit your page and place your cursor where you’d like your reference section to appear.
2. Go to the “Embed Widget” tool in the toolbar and then to “Reference.”
3. Select “Embed Reference Text” and then save your page.

Have your students give it a try as they cite sources for their next research paper, and let us know how it goes with an e-mail to help@wikispaces.com.