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Tonight I was preparing to work on my wiki for the Digital Native Lunch and Learn Series that I will be facilitating at my school with 14 teachers. I have a long way to go for building my wiki. I had just visited Jennifer Wagner’s wiki on her new online project “Does this Commute” and noticed now nice it looked. So, I decided to ask my friends in the twitterverse their opinion about what wiki application they preferred and why. In a matter of a few minutes, I received the following suggestions and advice from my friends. The network is amazing!

Durff wrote: wikispaces is just easier to use than others.

JLWagner wrote: Tina — I am not an expert — but I use both Wikispaces and PB Wiki. Necessary to showcase both to provide options for teachers. IMHO.

Tina — if you know your html (or css) you can totally tweak PBwiki with the kind of look you wish. Just like with WordPress.

Tina — I like the toolbar of PBWiki a bit more — not sure why though. But I hate the side nav.box. I wish I could make it go away.

Tina — Please make sure you get the FREE “NO ADS” on both PBWiki and Wikispaces. You can’t get them on the regular page.

And Tina — you can also use WETPAINT too. Not that you aren’t overwhelmed enough already!

and TINA — if you have your OWN site…check to see if you have FANTASTICO loaded. If so, it will install wikis for you automatically!

John Pederson wrote: I love MediaWiki, but it requires setup and has a steep initial learning curve. (It’s what Wikipedia runs on.)

Wikispaces is a very close second though…very easy to get into.

Yes. Go for Wikispaces.

K. Christopherson wrote: pbwiki. The interface is easy, the plugins work wonders and my staff likes the idea of pb!

I’ve used both wikispaces and pb. I found the pb site easier to navigate and didn’t have as many problems getting back to home.

zoho also has a wiki. Although not as popular it is another alternative - goes with the whole zoho suite.

they just might be the people who would use a wiki - great place for them to store information!

Ryan Bretag wrote: If it is an educational blog, you can tweak the themes to adjust the “box” feel.

sorry blogs on brain… I meant wiki. If it is, you can do major tweaks for free. If not an ed wiki, upgrade needed

you can switch to edu. by going to your wiki > manage space > subscriptions and at the bottom you can make the request.

Chris Betcher wrote: I like the simplicity of PBwiki with a single password, but I prefer the granular control of wikispaces. wish it had better tables.

Sharon Peters wrote: mediawiki needs to be installed on your own server and then twiddled with to make usable - wikipedia uses MW as software

media wiki is open source software = free! You could certainly host on your internal server.

installed it myself a couple of months ago to play with - pretty easy - just have a few tweaks for file uploads (jpgs)

you may want to look at this - http://www.wikimatrix.org/ - comparison chart of wikis

wetpaint site - http://tinyurl.com/2b5dv7

wetpaint site created by friend’s ed grad students last summer about web 2.0 tools

Image by Chad Anderson

Technorati Tags: wiki twitter mstina tmsteele durff jlwagner ijohnpederson kcrhsitopherson ryanbretag chrisbetcher sharonpeters chadanderson

Last Tues. I was at Moore Norman Technology Center for a Career Cluster Meeting. Career Tech Schools all across the Nation are moving towards the career cluster model, and so is Oklahoma. Our system is working to unify all schools across the state. I am attending this meetings to work with our curriculum directors to help with the development of our student record systems in managing the data changeover. This is a BIG deal for our schools and others across the state. It is going to be a challenging alignment all of our school’s curriculum.

Last Thur. I was at the OkACTE NRS (New and Related Services) Leadership Conference 2007. This year I am president-elect for NRS. We had a safari Theme for the conference and had several really great speakers, including one of the VP’s from Sonic (which, I had no idea, started in Shawnee, Oklahoma!). (side note, I lived in Shawnee for one year of my life…)

The highlight of the day was when we had “Safari Joe” come in with live animals. He brought in an alligator, python and leopard turtle. We took pictures of all the attendees who were interested in holding the alligator and python.

Next year I will be President of NRS and will be responsible for overseeing and putting the conference together. After Safari Joe, how can I top this? I will need all the help for speakers and themes I can get. Twitter friends????

Today I was at the ODLA (Oklahoma Distance Learning Association) Conference in Tulsa, OK, at the OSU-Tulsa campus. The theme this year is Web 2.0. Our opening speaker was Wes Fryer. Of course, I was glad to finally meet Wes face to face, as we have exchanged conversations via Twitter and his blog “Moving at the Speed of Creativity.”

The meetings, seminars and conferences are so good for information exchange and learning. Yet, I find the best part is the networking. I love the quick chats in the hall, finding out what other people are doing at other schools. I love trading business cards and email addresses, phone numbers, and planning visits to their sites. To me, getting to know other people and what sharing and learning with them is the most fun part about these events. I love talking to the vendors and finding out what all the cool new technology stuff is and what it does.

Wedesday we are heading out for a leadership retreat with all of our directors. We are going to be going to Robber’s Cave. We are going to be focusing on our vision and planning for our school. This is an important time for us. It will be a time to set the direction for our school for the next year, the next five years, and possibly the next 15 years. I appreciate that our school has leadership at the top that sees the importance of devoting time to this process.

So, as I continue to grow and learn while attending these meetings, seminars, and conferences, I am also expanding my network - which is very exciting. I hope I will continue to meet more and more of my friends in the twitterverse and blogosphere F2F!

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