Free Webinar - Building a Knowledge Base With Wikispaces

Next Tuesday, January 22, Wikispaces is hosting a free webinar for people who are interested in learning how to use the free Wikispaces service to organize a knowledge base. The webinar will cover creating an archive of resources that you wish to organize and make accessible to people in your organization. You can get the complete registration details for the webinar on the Wikispaces blog.

And if you're looking for some other ideas about using Wikispaces in your school, here are some ideas that I shared last spring:

1. As a digital portfolio of student-created videos.

2. As a place for students to share notes on each unit of study in your courses.

3. As an alternative to textbooks. Work with colleagues in your school or department to create a multimedia reference site for your students. Include YouTube videos that use the "choose your own adventure" model to allow students to pursue areas of interest.

4. As an alternative to textbooks. Have students create reference pages for units of study in your course. When you do this students become responsible to each other for creating accurate and meaningful content that they can refer to when it comes time for assessment. For example, when I get to the 1920's in my US History curriculum I have each student create a page on a wiki about a theme from that decade. Some of the themes that the students cover are fashion, entertainment, and sports.

5. As a place to track, document, and manage on-going community projects. In my district every student is required to complete a community service project before graduation. As a homeroom or "common block" advisory teachers are supposed to help their students take the necessary steps to document that work. By creating a homeroom wiki you create a place where students can make weekly updates about what they have done to complete their projects.