New:

• Create user accounts on your own: If you have an educator account, you can now enter up to 100 usernames (with or without email addresses) and Wikispaces creates user accounts and passwords for you. Great option for getting your students connected to your wiki in a hurry.
• All your wikis are easy to get to from the green arrow at the top of every screen. Used to be a bit hidden on the side toolbar.

And though this isn’t new, it’s worth noting that Wikispaces makes it incredibly easy to incorporate content from other web services, including:

• photos & slideshows
• audio & video
• chat sessions
• RSS feeds
• maps
• polls
• and much more.

Wouldn’t this be a great class project?

Take a look for yourself and then get out your video cam and explain your favorite word.

One of my favorites was “fermata”, which was a new word for me!

(via: Infodoodads)

250,000 More K-12 Wikis Like the first 100,000, all of our K-12 wikis feature all the benefits of our Plus service:

• full privacy, only the people you allow in can see your wiki
• no advertising, your online classroom will remain ad-free
• unlimited use, as many users, pages, edits, and files, as you like, no limits
• a customizable look and feel, so you can make it feel like home

Share Your Wikispaces in Education Story: Have a great story about how you’ve used Wikispaces? Share it!

Announcing a new way to make PBwiki a part of your classroom this year with:

* A FREE Premium PBwiki ($250 value)
* Tools to help spread the word
* Support for using 21st century collaboration tools in your classroom!

It’s free to join. Sign up to hear about the launch before anyone else.

Scotia-Glenville BC Calculus Wiki

Our BC calc students created a wiki for future classes to use. The students did a great job, especially with adding math content and the editing of math symbols, etc. The awesome teacher of this class allowed her students the freedom to create content, drive the vision of the wiki, and solve problems, and her students rose to the occasion. The student who actually created the backbone for the wiki is an incredible student.

This is an an impressive project! Well done!

10 years ago, Trudi and Laura collaborated on what I’ve always considered the definitive guide to evaluating web content. Their new guide is equally invaluable.

From Laura’s blog post Evaluating Web Content in the 2.0 Era:

“In a way, it’s fair to say that evaluative criteria don’t really change based on the type of site or material encountered. While this may be true, it’s also the case that students need help with looking for cues in different types of environments. In fact, some students aren’t even sure what they’re looking at.”

A number of tools for creating digital stories are mentioned, including VoiceThread. (I was looking for more info on VoiceThread when I came across this project.)

VoiceThread is remarkably easy to use. Within minutes of signing up, I’d loaded several photos from my flickr account into my first VoiceThread project and was ready to record some narration. Had I been able to face crawling behind my computer to reattach my microphone, I would have had a voice narrated photo show in less than 5 minutes. Amazing! Instead, my first story is narrated with text comments instead a voiceover – a handy option for those without microphones or who are microphone-a-phobic.

Stories can be public or private and can include text and voice comments. Comments can be open to all or moderated. What a great tool for group storytelling. Stories are hosted on the VoiceThread site and can be embedded on other web pages/blogs. VoiceThread is currently free and it hopes to stay that way. But they’re committee do stay free for educators and their students. I’m really impressed with VoiceThread.

And even more impressed with the creative use of it (and other digital storytelling tools) at Great Book Stories.