Hi Doug,
A word of explanation:
My TrueNorth wiki was set up for a class that I took a couple of years ago. In the beginning I thought that it might serve as a collaborative tool, but as things have progressed, I’ve given up on that idea after presenting it to a couple of different likely groups of people - who did not apparently share my vision. Ah, well, the wiki is nonetheless useful for me as a filing system for my various teaching ideas. It’s become a planner/notebook of sorts.

The idea of using a similar system for student work is intriguing and I hope to initiate that with my students this year. I want to use the [34] Wikka engine, like I do with my TrueNorth wiki because it is easy to use, and because you can set the access privileges for reading, writing, and commenting on each page. This will allow some measure of security for students to use it as they develop things. The privileges can be set to allow global access, individual access, and any intermediate set of access priveleges as well.

With TrueNorth, I’ve set up a CSS style sheet that strips most of the navigation features off the page, making it a little more personal, less publically useful. I recommend Wikka, but my current application of it isn’t a good example of a public wiki.

This is an interesting question, and I’ll be curious to see what you come up with.

Glad to hear it’s not just me who’s found themselves keen to try out a wiki, but unsure which route to take. I’ve found the wiki module built into moodle very difficult to use, and my inital attempt to use it as a planning sketchbook for me has quickly fallen by the wayside, having failed the pencil and paper test.

My plan as it stands is to try and integrate three types of wiki in the next few months. The first is going to be using the ‘glossary’ module in moodle with my business studies class for them to start creating a class glossary of the many many key terms they need to get their head round (probably backed up with the new content generator [35] half a min quiz. The second will be with my A level Sociology class, and having given up on the moodle wiki I need to do some more investiagting into the best option. The final use will be with our school pupil run newspaper which this year we’re taking digital with a WordPress powered website holding the stories, and a wiki for the pupils to work on their stories together.

Wish me luck!

While I don’t know if this is “good practice” with wikis, here’s where I’m going. I set up a wiki for my elementary school. At present it is wide open - anyone may edit. It is currently maintained by me (grade 3 teacher) and 3 parents.

I see this wiki, or something like it, eventually (within a year or two) taking over the place of our school web site:

[36] http://www.arborheights.com

I’ve maintained that school web site for over a dozen years. Every single word on it has been published by me - uploaded via [37] ftp. Aside from the fact that this is getting a bit old and tedious, I feel that the wiki offers a chance for collaboration unlike anything come before it. And the world has changed over those dozen years - no? The way we look at authoring and ownership of information is changing so drastically.

Right now the parents are just running with the wiki! Incredible content added regularly. We are now collaborating on design, layout, ease of use for visitors, all kinds of things I have done solo for so long - how truly cool!! A small group monitors changes to the space via rss:

[38] http://arborheights.wikispaces.com

I have a couple of wikis reserved, ready to go with my classroom, when I find the time - ha! - Mark

Thank you for your comments Doug, Dave and Mark. I’m glad to know, Mark, that the parents of your students are running with the idea of a wiki. I wonder how many people are actually using a wiki with their students, though?

I think, to some extent, we’re a bit ‘ahead of the curve’. There’s an optimum time to do things which is dependent upon a groundswell of opinion, motivation and publicity. At the moment I think wikis are slightly too exotic and difficult-to-use (on the whole) to be mainstream. What we probably need are more examples of people using them both with colleagues and students whilst blogging about recommendations for setting one up in the first place!

I tried all of them and wikispaces, to me is a lot easier to use. Also, although it looks like the students can edit all of my pages, wikispaces allows you to protect pages that you do not want members of your space to edit. My homepage and the wiki awards pages are locked and students cannot edit them.

I am partial to wikispaces, but have seen several people switch lately who think wikispaces is easier to use.

I know my home page looks cluttered! I guess that is what RSS does to it! My students do know where to go and if I don’t have their work on the home page, they tend to forget about it. I have all of their screens set to start up there!

Hi Doug

Just a quick question and I guess a little of task, but still related. I am always keen to give things a go and keep upto speed. I have a website, Blogg, Word Press Blogg and played with Mooodle.

I guess my main question is how do you host so many different tppes of sites, with so many different domain names. ARe you simply paying the cost or is there some secret worth sharing. Too my knowledge my web host, only gives one domain and limited functionality to run multiple MySQL dependant sites.

Cheers

Will

Will, since listening to [39] EdTechTalk’s podcasts for the last year I’ve picked up that most people in the know use [40] Bluehost for hosting. It’s really cheap, you get loads of space and bandwidth, and you can host more than one site on it. I think it cost about £60 for a year, if memory serves. Currently I’m hosting mrbelshaw.co.uk through a UK company that charges me about £7.50/month for nowhere near the same deal.

Apart from the [41] historyshareforum and mrbelshaw.co.uk, everything else I do is hosted for me via various free services, so I don’t need to worry!

Oh, one more thing. I’m expecting my earnings from [42] Google Adsense to go through the £100 barrier soon which means I’ll get a cheque which should cover the majority of my web hosting for this year…

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