Upcoming Panel on Common Core Standards

Join us tomorrow, December 11 at 11am PST, for our live panel on Common Core Standards. We’ll be speaking with Djuna Dudeck from the Pulaski County Special School District, Arkansas as she shares her experiences and insights around creating and implementing a strategy for the upcoming standards. It’s going to be both a fun and informative event. We hope to see you there.

Upcoming Future of Education Podcast

On Tuesday 18 December at 5pm Pacific, we’ll be participating in a Future of Education podcast with our good friend Steve Hargadon.

After reading our recent How to Succeed in Ed-Tech article, Steve suggested a conversation about education entrepreneurship with us and his brother Andrew who is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at UC Davis.

As with anything Steve does it should be thoughtful and energizing. We’re looking forward to it.

Please join us at 5pm US Pacific time on Tuesday 18 December at http://futureofed.info

Update: The recording is now available.

Upcoming Webinar: Building a Knowledge Base with Wikispaces

Join us on January 22 at 11am PST as we explore one of the most popular uses for wikis: knowledge bases. Whether you’re in charge of building an archive of standards and procedures in your company, a teacher setting up a collaborative research project for your students, or a district administrator looking to create a shared curriculum resource for your educators, we’ll help you build it.

Join us for the free hour-long event and learn to get started with your own online resource database.

Update: A recording of the event is now available. Enjoy and let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.

Create a Site Directory on Your Homepage

In large schools and districts, the amount of resources and information can be daunting. By adding a little structure, Mike Baker of South Side Area School District in Pennsylvania, made it easy for people to access and add to the information they want.

“We use our Private Label as our students’ homepage in the computer lab. This allows even Kindergarten students to click the home button and go directly to a common starting point. We have our students using the ‘Rover’ app on their iPads and going to the bookmarked student wiki. All of the district’s online learners access various courses via our wiki. This concept is quick to edit and keeps students organized.”

Above are a few simple ideas for creating a stunning, easy-to-navigate, and effective home page. We hope you’re inspired by your fellow users’ designs. We’re always looking to see more. Feel free to share your work of art with us at help@wikispaces.comor on Twitter.

Use Buttons for Navigation

Maria Sardo and her colleagues from Sysco have created an easy-to-use homepage for their wiki on their Private Label site. Diane, a member of their team, created a beautiful streamlined design that uses graphics for navigation buttons. Her team uses them to easily move around the site.

Sharmaine Sharusan, a Private Label customer from Everest College, created a smartphone-like experience for her users and shared her design secrets with us.

“I used a simulated button design to mimic the familiarity of apps that most users are accustomed to seeing on their smartphones. Most of those links open in a new window/tab while still allowing them to have access to the original homepage.

“Additionally, I chose the size of the buttons in order to fit on screens with lower resolutions. And I chose icons and words for the visual recognition of the service/website they would be accessing. The other clever thing I did was make each row a separate page. The same buttons can be seen on other sites within our Private Label. In the long-run, this makes it easier to swap out icons on the homepage just by making a change on the included page.”

Create an Editable Website

We recently unveiled a new option for your wiki: our editable website mode. This mode lets you hide the management tools of the wiki so your users see a simple clean interface. A lot of our users have told us they love this new mode, including Karen from Coorana. She chooses this mode when creating wikis for groups who need to view and access resources on a site but won’t be editing.

Add a Welcome Message

The front page of your Wikispaces wiki or the Home wiki on your Private Label site is important real estate. It’s the first thing your users see, so we encourage users to take time to edit it and welcome folks stopping by. Coonara Community House Training in Melbourne, Australia has done an excellent job of this. Their home page has a simple welcome message describing the goals of the site, their contact information in case anyone needs to reach them, and a picture to spruce up their site.

You may also want to check out their Ementor wiki. There they share specific information about who they are and how their visitors can use and navigate the wiki. And with a few small changes – a great color scheme and an embedded Voki widget – their wiki became a fun place to visit.

We spoke with Karen George at Coonara about her experience. “Every day, we are learning new things, adding widgets and gadgets to make the learner experience much more engaging. We also don’t forget about our trainers. The sites need to be pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate and easy to find the information we need. We are all time poor so design and ease of use is a must. Tutors who once resisted are now using the sites to get their work done…It’s now an expectation that all staff access appropriate wiki sites to keep themselves informed.”

Kristine Roshau and Concordia University do a great job combining a clear welcome message with a snazzy logo. Take a look below.