Back in 2005 I began playing around with wikis, trying to discover which one best suited my needs. Over the intervening years I’ve enjoyed watching the different platforms mature. Now that I am a technology coordinator, my criteria have changed because I need an enterprise-level wiki solution.
Before I started this job, I don’t think I even knew what enterprise-level wiki solution meant so let me explain. If I only need a wiki for myself or a small group of people, my needs are tremendously different than if I need to be able to create tens, even hundreds of wikis that will be edited by thousands of people. All of a sudden the ease with which you can create and manage accounts and wikis becomes important.
Other considerations had to do with advertisements, privacy settings, and whether or not students needed an email address to have an account. Drill down control is also important. It would be nice to be able to set permissions at the page level rather than at just the wiki level. That way, different groups could have full rights to edit some pages and few or no rights to edit other pages.
I’ve been using WetPaint, Wikispaces and PB Works for years. I’ve used all three with students and with staff. Wetpaint is still my favorite in terms of how it looks, the templates it has, and how well the tables work. Until this term, we have been using it for our parent conference sign ups and it has worked exceptionally well.
Unfortunately, they don’t offer corporate plans. If we want ad-free wikis we’d need to pay for each one separately, and there is no way to administer them centrally. Wetpaint used to offer free ad-free wikis for K-12 use but they quit doing that. We have no way to create accounts for children.They also were mis-applying the COPPA rules and shut down one of my teachers’ wikis even though the parents created the accounts, not the children.
We did not want to host the wiki ourselves so that left only Wikispaces and PB Works as options. Each has some nifty features that the other lacks. Neither is as pretty as Wetpaint and the tables aren’t quite as nice, but they can meet our needs. In the end, it felt like a roll of the dice but we went with Wikispaces since they were going to give us more a bit more for our money. Since then PB Works has introduced a new rate for schools so each are equally viable. You can view the Wikispaces plans here and the PB Works ones here.
We are due to start parent conference sign up next week, so we had to quickly shift the conference wiki from Wetpaint to our new Wikispaces.net account. Unlike Edublogs, Wikispaces doesn’t send you a nifty manual to get you started after they take your payment. We had to stumble our way through setting it up. In my next blog a future post I’ll share with you what we have learned so far.
I just introduced myself to Picasa and it looks like it will be a great tool to teach creative writing and production to students of varying ages and skill levels. In a college educational technology class, we’ve just used letterpop to create our newsletters — very easy application with a great product. I look forward to hearing your choices.