A wikispace is your own website. You create the URL and your students and anyone anywhere can see any resource you put on your wiki. It's a great resource for teachers to post their assignments, calendars of assignments, pictures, videos, audio, etc. Also students can create their own wikispace for generating creative assignments.

Table of Contents

Creating an account

The Cover of your Wiki

Editing your Cover

Table of Contents

Inserting a External Link

Inserting a Wiki Link

Inserting a File or Image

Inserting an External Image

Inserting a Widget

Inserting any Widget

Embeddable Widgets

Conclusion and Student Wikipages

Pages 4 - 6

Page 7

Pages 8 - 11

Pages 12 -13

Pages 14 - 17

Pages 18 - 21

Pages 22 - 27

Page 28

Pages 29 - 35

Pages 36 - 37

Page 38

Page 39

Go to www.wikispaces.com and click on 'create your own classroom wiki today'

This will be the actual name of your website. For example, if you put MrPaolini, the URL of your wikispace will be http://mrpaolini.wikispaces.com

Make sure to select "Protected" and check the box that it'll be used for K-12 education.

Remember this! Write it down. You'll need it to log into wikispaces and to make changes to your wiki in the future!!

Now click 'Join'

You're in! NOW you must verify your wikispace by checking the email you put in when you created your wiki. Wikispaces will send you an email with a link, simply click on the link to verify and start your wiki!

The Cover of your Wikispace.

This is the 'cover' of your wiki, consider this a cover of a book your are writing. This should be used as an introduction to the user/viewer. Do not put an overwhelming amount of information on your cover, we can put that info in the 'Table of Contents'.

Table of Contents

You can only change parts of your wiki when you click on the 'Edit' button here. But this will ONLY let us edit the Cover of our Wiki or the page we are looking at.

To Edit your Cover

Click on the 'Edit' button in the upper right hand corner and the editor bar will appear. This is the backbone of your wiki. If you want to make any changes, you HAVE to click on the 'edit' button first.

Editor bar

Once you click 'edit' you can then type and do whatever you wish to the space provided

Any changes you make to your wiki will not be saved unless you click 'Save' here.

Editing

You can simply type what you want on the cover of your book. I like to include contact information and other important info.

REMINDER: Keep it simple! Maybe a photo and your class you each....it's a cover of a wikispace...

Any changes you make to your wiki will not be saved unless you click 'Save' here.

Editing TextHighlight the text you wish to edit and then click on the "T" with painters pallet

Take a moment to get familiar with the options within the 'Color and Style' option.

Make certain to click on 'Apply Styles' at the bottom.

You can also 'Bold, Italicize, and Underline' your text by highlighting it and clicking on these options.

You can also make your text a 'Header' by clicking on this drop down option.

There is also a spot to create numbers and bullets as well as a divider here.

Any changes you make to your wiki will not be saved unless you click 'Save' here.

Table of Contents

If we click the 'edit navigation' option here, an editor bar will appear for us to edit THE TABLE OF CONTENTS ONLY

WARNING: This is going to look exactly like clicking the 'EDIT' button here. But we're only editing this small strip or Table of Contents here.

This is what we see when we click on 'edit navigation' in our table of contents

This is the SIDEBAR of our wikispace we call the table of contents. This should be ONLY links to other wikis within your wiki (I'll explain that) or an external link like www.google.com

If you type the generic name to an EXTERNAL link, then highlight it, click on 'Link' in the editor bar and you will see this block appear.

You have 2 options, a 'Wiki Link' or an 'External Link'. Since PSD mail is an external link outside of wikispaces, we will click on this tab

You need to know the URL or copy the URL from the site you want to link to. Above is the URL to PSD mail for students. I pasted it into here. Now we can click on 'Add Link'

Doing so will create the highlighted text into an external link in our Table of Contents to PSD mail.

Click 'Save' And after you click 'Save', your Table of Contents on the left hand side will show the new link you made to the external link

The link you created has appeared! It's now part of your Table of Contents and we can still see our Cover Page.

Let's click on 'edit navigation' again to add another link

We now are going to add a 'Wiki Link'. This is another wikipage attached to your Table of Contents. This will let us create a separate page for ANYTHING we wish to create. This is where you can create a wiki inside of a wiki inside of a wiki inside of a wiki....and so on :-)

Type the text of the wikipage you want to create, then highlight it. Click on 'Link' in the editor bar, select 'Wiki Link' and click 'Add Link" This will create another wikipage attached to your table of contents.

Any changes you make to your wiki will not be saved unless you click 'Save' here.

Here is our Wiki Link we created to 'Period 1 General Science'. We can now click on the link and begin editing.

So we have our cover page of our Wikispace and we have a link to our Period 1 General Science class wikipage here.

Let's click on our link.

Remember to edit our Table of Contents we click 'edit navigation'

The 'EDIT' button here allows us to edit our 'Period 1 General Science' wikipage.

Since we clicked the 'EDIT' button, we are now editing our 'Period 1 General Science' Wikipage

EXACTLY like the cover of our Wikispace, you can type and put just about any content here by simply typing. We are going to get a little more advanced by inserting files and widgets next. Please click on 'File' in the editor bar

Inserting a File

IMPORTANT: Put your cursor where you want the file or image to go.

Click on the "EDIT" button to bring up your editing bar and then click on 'File'

Inserting a File

This block will appear when you click on 'File'. You MUST have the image or file saved on your computer, network or flash drive to insert it. You can use an 'external link' which we'll get to in a moment

Click on 'Upload Files' here and select the file to upload. This is similar to the 'Browse' button a user would use to find a file for uploading or attaching to an email.

Select the file you wish to place on your wikipage. Remember not all visitors of your wikipage may have Notebook, or Word, or Excel. A safe bet is to turn your files into PDF format before uploading

Select the file and click 'Select' or 'Upload' on a PC and wikispaces will upload your file to your space.

Your file or image you've selected was uploaded and now appears here as a thumbnail. Double click on the thumbnail to insert the image for file. REMEMBER TO HAVE YOUR CURSOR WHERE YOU WANT THE FILE OR IMAGE TO BE PLACED

Your image or file will appear as a light grey block that looks like this. It will not look like this once you click 'Save'. Go ahead and click 'Save'

Once you've clicked 'Save' your grey blocks and images will appear in final format on your page. I inserted an image the SAME EXACT way we inserted a file. Remember you have to have the image saved to your X-drive or desktop or somewhere you can easily retrieve.........oooorrrrrrrr

Inserting an Image from an External Link

If you find an image on the web and just want to copy the URL of that image, you can insert an image that way.

Click on the 'EDIT' button, the editor bar appears, click on 'File' like we are inserting an image or file, and when this block appears, click on the tab 'External Image' and paste the URL of the image and click 'Load'. You will then need to double click the image to insert it into your page

Remember to click 'Save' to make permanent changes to your space

Embedding a Widget

First off, a Widget is anything that you find on the web or as a resource that has an embed code. For example, if you find a video on YouTube.com, there is often an embed code you can copy and use to put that video into your own wikispace.

Embedding a Widget

There are lots of audio resources, podcasts, videos, calendars, etc. out on the web that have an embed code. So if you ever find something that you want to put on our wikispace, look for an embed code. If it has one, you're in luck!

Ok.....let's start simple with embedding a video.

Click on the 'EDIT' button, and your editor bar appears, click on 'Widget' and this block appears. DONT PANIC! This block shows how many different embeddable widget kinds are out there.

Let's click on 'Video' right here.

This screen will appear for you to select the resource you got your video from. THIS REALLY DOESNT MATTER!! As long as you have the embed code, you can select any of the above. Click on 'YouTube'

This block will appear and this is where you take the embed code that we copied from YouTube.com and paste it into this block. Once you do so, click 'Save'

Your video will appear as a greyish block (just like the file we inserted) and will not be able to viewed until you click 'Save'

You can now see our video we found on YouTube.com is on our wikipage! Direct from YouTube.com, the video is streamed to your wikipage. You can do this for student videos that you upload to YouTube.com or SchoolTube.com as well!

Any embed code you find......

Wikispaces is not picky when it comes to embedding widgets. If you find an embed code on the web and want that widget in your wikipage, copy the embed code!

Then go through the same process we went through to embed a video. Click 'Edit', then 'Widget'....

Then click here, 'Other HTML'

Paste your embed code you found in the block above like you did for your video. Again, you could do it this way for a video you found on YouTube.com or a Google Spreadsheet or calendar, etc.. Wikispaces is not picky when it comes to widgets.

Don't forget to click 'Save' and then 'Save' to make your changes permanent.

I am not going to cover EACH widget that wikispaces puts on their options. Just know that if you find an embed code on something, you can put it in your wikispace.

Here is a list of some things that have embed codes available for embedding in your wiki.

· Google Spreadsheet/Calendar/Docs/Presentation/Forms· RSS Feeds· Audio (Podcasts)· Videos· Slideshows· Maps· Chats and Instant Messengers· Bookmark Sites (Delicious)

ConclusionI am here to help. I do not expect anyone to feel lost or helpless. DO NOT HESITATE TO CONTACT ME FOR ANY HELP! There is a learning curve with anything new. Hopefully this packet will ease that transition into using a wikispace in your classroom.

Don't forget that I can help you have your students create their own wikispace. I've worked with teachers who instead of having their students create a PowerPoint or type a paper, they have them create their own wikispace and the teacher grades their work right from the students wikispace.

Student created wikispaces

Created by:Nick PaoliniSaegertown High School Technology Integration Coachnpaolini@penncrest.orgSkype: nickpaolini81814.337.1658724.333.4120