Today we are extraordinarily pleased to announce Wikispaces Classroom to the world.

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 and I will be attending the ASU/GSV Education Innovation Summit in Phoenix next week. We’re looking forward to meeting and being inspired by a lot of great entrepreneurs and teachers.

We wrote a short piece for their blog to stimulate discussion about how people in ed-tech define and pursue success.

Let us know if you’re going to be at the event in Phoenix so we can meet up and of course please share your thoughts on what a successful ed-tech company looks like to you.

Are you attending the Sloan Consortium / MERLOT Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning in Las Vegas this week? Us too. Wikispaces Co-Founder James Byers will be at the conference from Tuesday – Thursday and would love to meet up and talk about how wikis fit into your world.

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.

We know you spend a lot of time creating and editing your wikis, which is why we’ve worked hard to make your experience even better in our upcoming release. Check out a few of our new changes below.

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.