Creating a wiki

I am trying to create a wiki using pbwiki.com. Does anyone have a tutorial for how to do this? My 8th graders are exploring careers, and the info on the web is not real accessible to my ESL students. My thought was let them create a wiki that other kids like them could visit. I teach English. To me it's an authentic reason for my kids to be writing!

But I have to figure out how to do somethings with the wiki.
All I have been able to do is set up a page with a "project" template (can I get other templates with the free membership?) What is with the FrontPage? What is it's purpose? How does the sidebar work? It doesn't seem to be like my edublogs sidebar in the ease of adding widgets.
Also, I'd love to show my kids some wikis now online so they can see the possibilities. Does anyone have advice?

Tags: wikis

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Permalink Reply by Marie on April 14, 2008 at 3:50am

Hi Tracey,

Here are some links, I think the first is from Kate Olsen (thanks Kate).

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2440900/Getting-Started-With-Wikispaces
http://www.wikispaces.com/help+Teachers

I have created a wiki at special needs resourcesyou are welcome to visit. When it is your own site, you can create pages. Down the left hand side, navigation, these are all the pages I have created. On each page there are links.

I hope this is helpful.

Marie

Marie

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Permalink Reply by Jason de Nys on April 14, 2008 at 6:48am

I really recommend their forum/help, no question is too simple for the good folks there.

The Frontpage is there because, well, you have to have something that greets people when you log one. Think of it as home. I have used it in the past as a place for announcements, much like a blog, with the latest news at the top of the page.

The Sidebar is best used as a navigation tool where you can have links to important pages. Editing it is the same as editing any other page. To embed a widget, click on 'Insert Plugin', choose 'PBwiki magic' and then 'HTML' and paste your embed code there.

For an example of a PBwiki you can go to one I made with my science class last year to look at how I organised the sidebar and made announcements on teh Frontpage. It was my first go at a wiki for an assessment task.

There were no templates at the time although I believe that they have them now. However, like anything made by someone else, they probably wont match your purpose all that well and you will end up doing almost as much work editing it as you would making one.

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Permalink Reply by Tracy on April 14, 2008 at 7:34am

Thanks!!!!

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Permalink Reply by Tracy on April 14, 2008 at 7:37am

Wow, this is so cool. I am so glad to have an example!

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Thumann on April 14, 2008 at 7:21am

Hi Tracey,

PBWiki has some video tutorials that may be of some help to you in getting familiar with their product.
You can find them at http://pbwiki.com/videos/.

I hope that helps a bit.
Lisa Thumann

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Permalink Reply by Tracy on April 14, 2008 at 7:35am

I guess it was so late last night that I didn't see the video help. Thanks!

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Permalink Reply by John Martin on April 14, 2008 at 7:57am

If the Sidebars get distracting, you can turn them off/hide them, or delete some of the pages such as QuickStart or RecentActivity. I've done that with some of my PBwiki pages on http://edventures.pbwiki.com just to get back some of the real estate. I don't really care to see the guest info as it often doesn't provide any specific info unless the Guests are registered and logged in through PBwiki.

You can modify your Sidebars if you wish by visiting http://yourwikiname.pbwiki.com/SideBar

A couple of other neat tricks are the Table of Contents [toc] feature and the Index page (http://yourwikiname.pbwiki.com/AllPages)

You can also create your own templates by creating a page and tagging it "template."

Feel free to drop a line if you've got additional questions or visit my wiki.

Cheers,
John Martin
EdVentures on Twitter

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Permalink Reply by Anne Bubnic on April 14, 2008 at 8:13am

I love PB wiki and have made over 30 PB wikis for educational purposes. I particularly love making wikis for workshops. Although I've never made them for use with kids, i make them for use by teachers-as-students all the time. So I can show you a couple of examples. To see these, you will need a PB Wiki account, which is different than a PB wiki. https://my.pbwiki.com/

Vocabucasting and Cybersafety wikis
Note that on these two wikis, all of the content links are over to the right.
http://ctapvocabucasting.pbwiki.com/
http://ctapcybersafetyschooladmin.pbwiki.com/

On this example, note that QuickStart and the Sidebar have different roles. For the sidebar, we created different pages for each school district in the workshop, so they could all work simultaneously and they could all see eachother's work. This is what you can do with your kids.
http://itouchhistory.pbwiki.com
Password: calisphere
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Here's an index to all of the PB wiki "help files" -- great stuff here.
http://help4all.pbwiki.com/SiteMap

Let me know if you need additional help. I'd even be happy to help set up your wiki for you. But stick with it, because you will love this tool!