Wikis 101

• 1. Go to Wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com) and sign up as an educaotor/teacher. Be sure to use your WUSD email address. You may need to confirm your email address via an email sent to you from Wikispaces.

1. You will be prompted to name your wiki. For our practice session, you can name it "MyPracticeWiki(your initials)". You can have more than one wiki associated with your account. You will also need to add in your school site, but the remaining fields are optional.

2. Notice that you once your wiki is created, it lands you on your homepage. Quickly review the menu items at the top right of the screen. Notice that you can invite members to your wiki to contribute, add projects, add an event, look at user statistics via the assessment menu, and change some of your settings. Go to settings and click through the menu down the left side of the screen to see what options you have. Customize your wiki by changing any of these options.

   1. Settings menu: Notice that your Wiki is automatically set to publich until you verify your account (click on your link in the email sent to you by Wiksipaces). Once you do this, your wiki is set to private, meaning only you and members of your wiki can see it.

3. To add your students as members (they will be able to actually edit the parts/pages that you allow them edit rights to), you can use the User Creator. You do not need email addresses for your students - be safe and do not use any last names of your students. You can add up to 100 students.

4. If at any time you have a question while working on your wiki, check out the Help in the far upper right corner. There is an entire list of help options to choose from.

5. Go back to the Home page for your wiki - click on the word "home" in the upper left corner or under the navigation on the right.

6. Click on the down arrow on the right corner of your text box and begin editing (you must hover over the box to see the down arrow).

7. Now that you've created your first wiki, make another for your classroom! Click "Create a new wiki now." Select "K-12 Education (Primary and Secondary)" as your category. Press the Continue button.

8. Name your wiki. Notice that it will end with .wikispaces.com as your URL (web address). Be sure to use letters, numbers, and hyphens, but no spaces.

Resources for Wikis and Wikispaces

• Introduction to Wikispaces - a video tour of using Wikispaces

• 50 Ways to Use Wikis for More Collaborative and Interactive Classrooms - from SmartTeaching.org

• Terry The Tennis Ball Choose you own Adventure Wiki - created in 2006 by 3rd and 4th graders