You can now resize and align your widgets in the same simple way you resize your images. You no longer need to struggle with that oversized calendar that creeps beyond the edge of your page or try to figure out how to make that poll sit to the left of your text. You can edit your widget without digging into code.

Say you’ve just embedded a video on your page and you want to make it a little bigger and have it sit in the middle of your page. How can you do that? Simple. All you need to do is:

1. Edit your wiki page.
2. Click on the video on your page.
3. A small pop-up box will appear allowing you to align or resize your video.
4. Select the changes you want and close the pop-up window.
5. Save your page to see how your newly-formatted video really brightens up your page.

It’s that easy.

So feel free to put widgets on your page, customize them, and give your page the look you want.

Join us at 4pm PDT today, September 15th for our monthly education webinar. We’ll show you some useful features for educators and introduce you to Cari Wilson.

Cari will be sharing several of her award-winning wikis with you, including an informational wiki about her home town and the 2010 Olympics at http://olympic-project.wikispaces.com and a virtual museum about ancient civilizations at http://elementsofcivilization.wikispaces.com/. Join us for the webinar and get some great ideas for your own collaborative wiki project.

For more information and to register for the event, visit: http://wikispacesineducation0909-2.eventbrite.com/. We look forward to seeing you there.

Maybe you’re an educator looking to set up a project for each student in your class and you would like each student to follow a similar format as they present their research. Or you’re a manager who would like your employees to fill out weekly expense reports on the wiki. Instead of formatting pages for each person or occasion, you can save time by using our page template tool.

To create a page template, go to “Manage Wiki” and “Templates.” There’s an option to either create a template from a blank page or from a page you have already built. You can edit your template further as you would any other wiki page. Once you save the page, your template will be created. You can edit it later by returning to “Manage Wiki” and “Templates.”

To create a new page from a template, click on “New Page.” Choose a name for your page and the template you would like to start from. Then all you have to do is click “Create” and you have your newly templated page.

As an educator interested in creating engaging wikis, you’ll want to keep resources like “Cool Tools for Schools” and “Getting Tricky with Wikis” handy for your Web 2.0 needs.



Julie, an 8th grade teacher, has made great use of both of these resources. First introduced to wikis at an educational conference, she was inspired by the creative and collaborative learning she saw happening with wikis and decided to build a similar learning experience for her kids. She began a wiki, set up the project guidelines, and added her students. Since the project started, Julie has had several kids wanting to do more advanced things with her wiki. She was able to help them by using these two great resources.

Lenva Shearing, the creator of these wikis, is the deputy principal of the Bucklands Beach Intermediate School in New Zealand and is an ICT facilitator for schools in her area. As she traveled to different schools, she was often asked by her colleagues about the online tools that were available to use in their classrooms.



Lenva began exploring different sites and keeping track of them on her wiki at http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com . “Teachers are busy people and if I can make it easier for them by locating these resources, testing them out and putting them in a central place, then I am happy to do it.” Lenva has since joined and evaluated over 500 different sites on the Internet, all which you can find on her wiki.

As she and her colleagues created more wikis, they wanted to have good-looking sites along with their educational content. Lenva kept track of the various tips and tricks she learned when designing her own wikis at http://gettingtrickywithwikis.wikispaces.com. There, you can find instructions to customize the layout and look of your wiki including how to add a table of contents to your site, place a background image on your page, and create column layouts.

If you are looking to do more with your own wiki, these two wikis are great resources to check out. We hope you enjoy them.

Join us at 11am PDT tomorrow, August 6th for our education webinar. We’ll show you features that educators have found useful in their work and introduce you to Nicole Naditz.

Nicole is a French educator and foreign language pedagogy trainer who has used wikis to share resources with her colleagues, connect her students with French epals, and work with a classroom in Burkina Faso on a solar power project. Join us for the webinar and hear what Nicole has learned through her various wiki experiences.

For more information and to register for the event, visit: http://wikispacesineducation0908-2.eventbrite.com/. We look forward to seeing you there.

This blog post is for IT / network administrators. If that doesn’t ring a bell or you’re not sure what an IP address is, you can completely ignore this post!

On August 14th, we’ll be updating the IP addresses for Wikispaces.com. For the vast majority of you, this change will be completely invisible, but if you’re a IT / network administrator or manage your firewall or site blocking software, read on:

On Friday, August 14 at 5 PM PDT (what’s that in my timezone?), we’ll be adding an IP address to wikispaces.com and *.wikispaces.com. The updated addresses will be:

75.126.104.177
208.43.192.33

Note: this change does not affect Private Label customers, only sites on Wikispaces.com.

So if you’re explicitly allowing traffic to Wikispaces by our IP address, please update your rules by August 14th. If you have any questions, please let us know at help@wikispaces.com.

Jeff Remington and several of his students will be speaking at this month’s free education webinar on Thursday, July 23 at 12pm PDT.

Jeff is a middle school teacher in Pennsylvania who created his classroom wiki as a space for his students to learn from and engage with peers in a different culture. Students from Pennsylvania and Haiti share aspects of their daily lives with one another as well as help supplement their partner school’s curricula with content and material from their own classroom’s lessons.

Join us for the webinar, see how to create your own educational wiki, and hear from both Jeff and his students about their experience. To register for the event, visit: http://wikispacesineducation0907-2.eventbrite.com/

Update: It was great to hear from Jeff and Liz as they shared the various projects that their students in Pennsylvania and Haiti did together. If you missed the webinar, you can view a recording of the event here.

Join us this Wednesday July 15th at 3pm PST/10pm GMT for our free Private Label webinar and learn about our wiki product for your entire company, school, or organization.

Wikispaces Private Label lets you create an unlimited number of wikis and user accounts in your own controlled, private, and secure environment. We will be happy to answer all of your questions and share tips, tricks, and examples to help you create an effective collaborative working space for your organization.

For more information about the event and to register, visit http://wikispacesprivatelabel0907-6.eventbrite.com. We look forward to seeing you there.

If you missed the event, you can watch a recording of it at: http://tinyurl.com/kqhy9w

Join us this Thursday July 9th at 11am PST for our Introduction to Wikispaces webinar. We’ll show you how to edit your wiki, teach you about the permissions and settings on your wiki, show you how to manage members on your wiki, and much more.

If you are new to wikis and are looking to do more with yours, we encourage you to attend. For more information and to register for the event, visit: http://wikispacesintro0907-4.eventbrite.com. We look forward to seeing you there.

Update: If you missed the event or would like to review what you learned, you can find a recording at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2009-07-09.0654.D.CA090BE1CFC3C94CF7321D6A717393.vcr.

Head to your wikis this week and check out our improved tagging system.

If you are unfamiliar with tags, they are labels you can put on your pages or files to sort them into different groups. As a teacher, you can mark all pages related to a specific assignment with a particular tag; or as a manager, label all files related to a particular project with one tag. You can then view that tag and quickly find all of the work categorized into this group.

With our new tagging system, we’ve made it even easier for you to categorize and manage your wiki. You can now:

• View page tags directly on wiki pages.
• Add, rename, or a delete a tag on any page you can edit, regardless of who posted it.
• Tag files on your wiki.

To view, add or delete tags on a page, go to the “page” tab, and then to “Details and Tabs.” If you would like to instead tag and categorizes files on your wiki, go to “Manage Wiki,” then “Files,” and click on the file name you’d like to tag.

With all these changes, you can still view and manage all the tags across your wiki by going to “Manage Wiki,” and then “Tags.” You can rename or delete a tag for all pages or remove tags by particular users.

Try out your new tags and let us know what you think at help@wikispaces.com .

Note: If your wiki has a customized theme, the old tag formatting will still appear at the bottom of your page. If you would like to remove it, edit your theme and find either:

<$WikiPageTags$>

or

<div id="showTags" style="display: none;">
<$WikiPageTags$>
</div>

Delete it from your theme, save your theme and you’re all set.