PBWiki Videos for Educators

"What's a wiki?" Isn't that the question you hear most often from teachers?

A new set of video interviews with Educators may help you provide the answer.

At CTAP, we love wikis and, in particular, we love PB Wiki. We have so many wikis that we actually had to create a wiki to keep track of all of our wikis! These one-trick ponies are so easy to create that they have been used extensively within our agency and we keep coming up with new uses every day:

• to post agendas
• to record notes at sub-committee meetings. (This works particularly well for us because we frequently video-conference meetings to avoid travel. One person is the scribe and a page refresh lets everyone - both near and far - immediately see what has been captured).
  
• to serve as a syllabus for workshops
  
• for public sharing of content created by teachers at Podcasting and Wiki workshops
• to act as tutorials for topics like United Streaming
• for conference sharing on sessions we attended at CUE
• for summaries of program area activities prior to staff meeting
• to start a dialogue for topics that will come up for discussion at meetings
  
• for District Technology Planning - (to keep all information about a district in one easily accessed place and to let committee members share and add content.)
  
• to reflect on our work in specific areas.
• to plan an upcoming staff retreat
• for professional learning community activities

Living in the Bay Area, we are close to the offices of PB Wiki. Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PB Wiki, admits that the company did not intentionally set out to create a tool for educators but quickly discovered that educators were major users of the service. Noting our activity at CTAP, Ramit was anxious to learn how they could support education. In December, he paid us a visit. And more recently, the company created these videos for educators to use in trainings. Some of my CTAP colleagues are among those speaking on the video about their experiences using PB wiki.

You can find this series of 6 videos on You Tube, starting with PB WIKI - What's a Wiki. They are also listed at the PB Wiki Educator's site.

For those of you who are wondering, "How do you find good models of wiki usage on PB Wiki?" ... rest assured that search capabilities are being added in the near future. The folks at PB Wiki want to make discoverability a key feature so educators can find other teachers who are teaching similar topics. Like you, we look forward to that capability.

In the interim, please feel free to share your ideas and experiences about PB Wiki.