Creating a Community of Practice for Teams to Share, Edit and Develop

To get your feet wet, try delivering your instruction on a wiki page. Taking a standard lesson, perhaps a text, an image, or even a slideshow, deliver these along with questions or activity instructions. As you gain confidence in gaining your wiki skills, you'll ready yourself to teach students how to edit their own pages and submit work. It does take time (a few hours) to set up student accounts, especially if students don't have email access at school; but I found that it was a time-saving flexible way to prepare class activities, provided your students have computer access. There is an online manual for educators and I have always found the PBWorks support staff to be very friendly responsive. Most importantly, my students gain essential digital literacy skills from the experience of working in the wiki environment of designing pages, formatting and organizing files, and submitting documents online.

I test-drove PBworks in a college class to see if I would like to apply it to my high school classes. My review could be a result of the professor setting up the class, but after reading additional reviews I feel that the flaws are the fault of the platform itself. The idea was to have a collaborative wiki space where class members could meet, exchange assignment, collaborate, and store files online. It started okay. But as the class progressed it became cumbersome to navigate. We also ran into problems with permissions and some students were allowed to save to the website while others were restricted. The plan was good. Implementation was poor.

PBworks allows teachers and students a medium in which to create a content rich Wiki that increases ownership in the learning process. The concept is fairly simple. You can create pages within the Wikispace that can house all sorts of information. The front landing page is the most important page in that students will go here to navigate to the specific information they are looking for or are looking to update. There are navigators on the side but most people use the front landing page main space to navigate. That is where PBworks can be very dangerous. It's extremely important to make sure the front page is clear and as clutter free as possible. It's very easy for teachers and students to get lazy and just haphazardly type loads of information on their pages. I would recommend that very simple pictures of the main parts of the wiki be created and labelled so that everyone who comes to the wiki knows exactly where to navigate to. There is a bit of a learning curve but students and teachers alike will learn best by creating and editing their own pages. Since this is a Wiki that is shared by the class, it is also very important to constantly monitor updates to the Wiki. PBWorks makes it simple to do this through different settings and also allows you to revert the pages back to previous saved iterations. You can also see each update. One final concern is the amount of e-mail this generates when there is an update. Sometimes, PBWorks defaults to sending users updates about changes every time there is a change. It's a very simple change in settings that can make these updates non-existent or less frequent. On the other hands, it may be useful to get updates on changes on a frequent basis. In summary, PBWorks is an extremely powerful tool for information sharing and creating and editing content. It is very customizable to meet the needs of your classroom if you are willing to take the time to learn about the features that are most important to you.