I am a self-confessed Christmas freak. There is nothing I like more than putting up a tree and getting out the tinsel. That love of the festive season has spilled over into my online life through a Christmas links wiki I set up a few years back that has links to all things Christmas. Every year, I pull it up and dust it off and see what needs updating etc. It always gets a huge number of hits around this time of year so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

Christmas wiki

PBWorks

It is also the time that I catch up with PBWorks given that pretty much all of my other wikis are with Wikispaces. While I generally prefer Wikispaces, I have to say that PBWorks is still a pretty good tool with some features that Wikispaces lacks.

One of these features is the ability to create folders and nest pages within them. While my Christmas wiki isn’t big enough to need this function, I could see that this would be very useful for one of my bigger wikis such as educational software where I have created index pages for different sections – the folders would then help to keep my pages organised and easy to navigate with people able to use the navigation panel on the wiki to move around the folders and access the pages within them.

I also like the formatting options for tables in PBWorks. The ability to set the width of tables being the biggest advantage over Wikispaces.

There are other very useful features such as  page level access and easily backing up the wiki but these are subscriber only options and at $99US per classroom wiki, that is not a cheap option. Still, overall this is still an excellent wiki alternative for teachers.

Mrs Pancake

I’m also reminded of the Mrs Pancake website as I have linked to her Christmas resources. She has really created a wonderful site with very high quality printable downloads for all kinds of topics. Go check it out.

Baby is calling so back to being a Mum!

While speaking of Xmas (and yes I know that we haven’t even reached December yet), I have been working on updating my Christmas Links wiki from last year in time for the festive season in schools.

You can find a large range of sites, games and activities related to Xmas on this site.

As you would probably have guessed from all of this, I am quite a Christmas freak. I could play Xmas music all the time if it didn’t drive my husband to absolute distraction

Finally, moving away from the whole Xmas theme and getting back to colour tools there is Idee Labs.  You can use this to find images based on colours of your own choice or from particular images. I think this would be great when exploring the moods of colours or just wanting to create a display around key colours. Here is a screenshot of the images that I generated by choosing the red and green colours you can see on the far right.