Sharing the Addiction

For
the past 3 years, Wikispaces has offered a service to educators where
we would create all the accounts for their students in bulk. We are
excited to announce that we have made this process even easier.

Now, for any of our K-12 wikis, you can create accounts for your
students without having to send us an e-mail. Simply go to
“Manage Wiki,” and then “User Creator.” All you
need to begin are the usernames and passwords you want for your
students. With the new user creator, you can:

• create accounts with or without e-mail addresses
• have passwords generated for you
• add a suffix or prefix to all the usernames to ease creation
• and make them members of multiple wikis straight away

All of these features help keep Wikispaces as my wiki of choice.

In saying that, PB Wiki has really added a lot of functionality in recent times including document management tools and an increase in the amount of storage space for free accounts (now up to 2Gb and if you pay $9 US, you can have unlimited!). You can put all of your uploaded files into folders to make it a breeze to locate them again.

I also like the way you can set a variety of access levels for members: administrator, editor, writer, reader, or page level only. If you want to move into using wikis for digital portfolios, the page level access option is exactly what is needed (eg if you want to make only certain pages available to parents and children).

It has also had the bulk student account creation tools for quite a long time.

So the race for the best wiki tool continues with both Wikispaces and PB Wiki having excellent features. People are always asking me to tell them which one I recommend and it is becoming harder to be as definitive in with my opinion. It will be interesting to see how each of these continues to develop! One thing I am going to investigate is backing up all of the work I have on my wikis. After losing the collections of feeds I had (see previous post), I am particularly aware at the moment of how fragile all of my work is sitting on servers on the other side of the world!

Anyways – I hope you had a wonderful Xmas (we had a really nice chilled out day at my parents) and that you do something fun for New Year’s Eve!