Many of you have asked us for materials you could use to help introduce fellow teachers to Wikispaces. We have just added some to our teacher’s help page that we hope you find useful.

There’s a customizable presentation for those times when you need to talk in front of your colleagues and would love an outline all ready to go. We introduce Wikispaces, show how it can be used in education, and go through the basic steps of using and editing your wiki.

We also produced a Getting Started handout that you can print and give to colleagues. It contains step-by-step instructions on how to start an educational wiki, begin editing your Wikispace, and create accounts for your students. It’s a great and simple reference guide for people to leave your presentation with.

Try these out and let us know you think at help@wikispaces.com .

March marks our third birthday here at Wikispaces, a time for reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re going. First, we’re tremendously grateful to the hundreds of thousands of passionate members of our community who have taken the time to get to know and use our service, tell us how they feel about what we’re doing, and spread the word. We would be literally nowhere without those who call Wikispaces home.

We also thought this birthday would be a good opportunity to talk about our philosophy as a company as well as share some statistics that tell our story in numbers.

We set out in March 2005 with the idea that people might want to easily host their own wikis for non-profits, classrooms, community groups, businesses, and their friends. We tested our theory by getting Wikispaces out in front of real people, asking for their feedback at every opportunity, and building what they needed. To our surprise, the first few months went amazingly well — a large influx of new members, great content, and most importantly feedback on what we should do next.

With some early success and a strong feeling that we could provide real value to our customers, we raised $125,000 from a group of angel investors in September 2005. This allowed the three of us (Adam, Dom, James) to work full-time on Wikispaces out of our little San Francisco office. Rather than try to “get big fast” by raising a huge amount of money and hiring a small army of people, we thought we would first build a profitable business by charging our customers reasonable prices for our services. We’ve done that and are growing quickly and organically as we had hoped we would. Bisma joined us in July 2007, followed by Sarah in September 2007. And we’re currently hiring designers, developers, and support gurus.

Along the way, you may have noticed that we operate a bit differently than some startup companies. We don’t have a PR firm or issue press releases, and we tend to worry a lot more about our members than about publicity. We work hard to make your experience on Wikispaces as positive as we can, and hope that you’ll tell a friend or two about us. This is our marketing strategy in a nutshell — making our members happy and productive.

As you have been a large part of getting us to where we are, we’d like to share some Wikispaces numbers with you that show how we are growing. At the moment, we have just over 920,000 registered members and over 390,000 wikis. In the last thirty days, over 1.7 million people visited wikis on Wikispaces.com and our Private Label sites. Wikispaces served 26 million pages last month and nearly 200 million pages in our third year of operation. This growth is primarily due to word-of-mouth from people like you. So give yourselves a hand, it’s been a great three years of growth!

Year four at Wikispaces is shaping up to be our best yet. From a much-improved user interface to more powerful ways to manage your pages, files, and users, we’ve got a great set of new features coming. But most importantly, we have big plans for improvements on our core mission: helping you get work done with your group quickly and easily. Like everything we do, we improve Wikispaces based on what you tell us. So keep the feedback coming, both here on our blog and at help@wikispaces.com.

All-Time

920,681 registered members
390,721 wikis

Year Three - 12 Month Total *

193,691,644 pageviews
10,865,066 unique visitors

30 Day Total *

26,385,223 pageviews
1,766,296 unique visitors

* Stats are from Google Analytics and are through 15 March 2008.

Yesterday, we released a highly-requested feature - advanced formatting of your wiki text. You can now change the color, font, size or alignment of text on your page.


To use this new feature:
1. Edit your page.
2. Highlight the text you wish to format.
3. Click on the text formatting icon in the toolbar .
4. Format the text as you wish and click “Apply Style.”

We are quite excited about this feature and have gotten “Oohs” and “Ahs” since releasing it last night. Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

I’ll be spending this Friday 7 March and Saturday 8 March at the CUE conference in Palm Springs. I’ll be speaking at the Classroom 2.0 - A Real-time Conversation panel, and will otherwise be out and about enjoying the enthusiasm of educators who are passionate about technology.

If you’re going to be there, please let me know. I’m always keen to meet as many of our wonderful members as possible.

Michele Haiken’s class, an elective for 7th and 8th graders on the history of rock and roll music, first began using Wikispaces after being introduced to it from a school computer coordinator. For their first project, they created a Webquest about the 1980’s rock and roll scene. “Students were required to research about music in the 1980s and design a rock exhibit for a rock and roll museum. Students worked in groups to create various products - feature articles, press releases, teaching and student guides, and museum calendars - explaining the exhibit highlights.”

This led to another project on the 50 All-Time Greatest Rockers. Each student was assigned a specific rock and roll artist to research, and was required to design a wikipage highlighting the artist. In addition, the class used the discussion pages available in Wikispaces for students to critique their classmates. “There had to be an entire mini-lesson on what was an appropriate response in the discussion section. The experience was useful. Looking though the discussions you will find that a lot of the students had great insights to add. And this insight went beyond `great page, cool graphics.’”

Michele said that they learned along the way how best to have students work together online in constructive and educational ways. After the first project, she decided to design the 50 Rocker product differently so that each student could be responsible for editing his own page. “As for photobuckets and other widgets, the students really showed me how to do that. Once one student started it, I asked how to do it, then taught other students. We were learning from each other - myself included.” And the learning continues as Michele is beginning new wiki projects for her classes this semester.

For more on webquests, you can check out the Classroom 2.0 Wiki Resources page. Under the “Books and Articles” section, there is an article called “The Student Webquest.”

We’ve updated our Navigation bar feature to make Wikispaces even easier for you. In particular, it should help new users with new spaces.

A space on Wikispaces is a place for you to do your work with your team and it can have an unlimited number of pages in it.

To help you navigate around and find all the different pages in your space, Wikispaces has a navigation bar which sits to the left side of your space. Previously as a new user, you had to edit the navigation bar manually by clicking “edit navigation” to add links to your new pages.

We’ve now automated this, making it easier for you to get started. Now, all the pages that you create will appear in the navigation bar automatically. Of course, should you choose to edit the navigation bar yourself, we’ll stop updating it so you can customize it as you like.

Let us know what you think about this feature or anything else you see on Wikispaces.

Based on many of your requests, we have added a new feature that allows you to easily embed dynamic information about your space into your wiki pages.

While editing your page, click on the embed widget icon in the toolbar.

The “Widget” window will pop up. Go to “Wikispaces.”

There you will see a list of our simple widgets you can add to your page, including a list of wiki pages, discussion area, tag cloud, and top contributors.

Click on the widget you would like to add and customize it as you see fit. Save your edit.

Enjoy the ease of monitoring changes to your space as your community engages with your Wikispace.

We have improved our tables making it easier for you to add or remove cells, align text, merge cells, create headings, or delete your table. On top of this, you can now place Latex, code, and RSS feeds into your tables.

Below you can find instructions for formatting your table. We hope you enjoy this new feature and continue to send us feedback about how to make Wikispaces even simpler.

1. To edit your table, click “Edit This Page.”
2. Place your cursor in a cell of the table that you wish to change. Our table icon will appear at the corner of that cell.
3. Click on it and a drop-down menu will appear in which you can edit a cell, row, column, or your entire table.
4. Choose your desired option and watch as your table changes within the visual editor.

For all of you interested in the use of web tools in education, there’s a great free event coming up that we’re very glad to be involved with.

It’s Classroom 2.0 Live and the first two day event is being held in San Francisco on Feb 1st and 2nd.

It’s being organized by Steve Hargadon, a good friend of ours and a great advocate for technology in education. As with everything Steve does, this event is open and accessible. You can attend either or both days, you can contribute to the agenda, and it’s FREE to attend. Sponsors, such as Wikispaces, will be supporting the event.

So if you are going to be or can be in town sign up now! And make sure to spread the word about this great event.

Here’s a little more information about Steve and Classroom 2.0. We look forward to seeing you in February.

Steve Hargadon is the creator of a social network for educators called Classroom 2.0, winner of the 2008 Edublog awards for educational use of a social networking site, and home to nearly 5,000 educators interested in using Web 2.0 in the classroom.

Steve is passionately committed to a vision of “engaged education” that is emerging from the use of Web 2.0 and collaborative software–blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. He believes that it is very important for educators to have hands-on experience with Web 2.0 technologies themselves in order to understand how personal learning and education change when involved in the read/write web.

Steve is proposing to do a series of local workshops for educators exposing them to these tools–and also allowing those already using Web 2.0 in education to meet up and participate in the teaching. He intends for these workshops to be free to educators.

For those of you in San Francisco, we’re going to be attending a meetup on 23 Jan with our friends at TechSoup.

The topic is using wikis as community-building tools.

Event details and RSVP are available now.

If you’re in town, drop by.