Yesterday, we posted feedback from educators called 10 reasons educators love us. Today, we’re posting feedback from superstar educator Kathleen Ferenz’s seminar on PBwiki. She asked the educators in her seminar…

“How would you use PBwiki?”

Our friend and top educator Kathleen Ferenz sends us a report from a workshop she recently lead on PBwiki:

“Here are some winning quotes from this week’s workshop evaluations,” she writes:

• “I love the ability of the wikis to easily create webpages for students and classroom use. The students can easily add information and student work for all to see through the use of the wiki.”
• “Learned about the power and usefulness of Wiki.”
• “Useful tools for sharing information with students, parents and other teachers.”
• “The introduction to wikis and google docs.”
• “PBwiki and Google resources are very useful skills that I aquired during this workshop!”
• “Good ideas to use in my classroom and in my professtion life.”
• “I can see the benefit of using wiki wiki with students and pass on the skills to fellow teachers at school.”
• “Wiki web pages for collaboration for teachers and students.”
• “Using Wiki is a fantastic opportunity for collaboration!”
• “Vast potential, fun, practical. Will immediately implement at my school.”
• “Setting up a pb wiki is invaluable.”

Coming up tomorrow: An answer to the question, “How would you use PBwiki in education?”

We’re announcing an awesome new feature today: voice chat on your wiki. You can talk to anyone (using voice) for free. This works for 1-20 people with no software download needed — and it’s ready to use today.

Watch the video below to see how it works:

Click To Play

What the video says:
We partnered with YackPack to bring voice chat to the PBwiki community. The Voice Chat plugin (also known as WalkieTalkie) brings live voice to your PBwiki pages. Everyone looking at the wiki page can hear your voice when you push down the “live� button and talk into your computer microphone. They can push the button and talk back. This makes it easier to collaborate with your team, classmates, or work group.

Insert the Voice Chat plugin on any PBwiki page, or you can put it in your sidebar (this makes it visible from all pages).

A very good use: You can leave your wiki page open all day and benefit from a “push to talk� voice connection. Any time you have something to say to your team, push the button and talk. It’s simple.

WalkieTalkie Widget . . .
* is free
* requires no installation or registration
* works on PC or Mac
* works anywhere in the world you have Internet
* connects your group with high-quality voice

The big news: You can use voice chat on your PBwiki today — free. Just insert the Voice Chat plugin by clicking Edit Page >> Insert Plugin >> Chat.

We have some free PBwiki materials I want to share with you.

Lots of our users give talks about wikis. Some are teachers, like the 1,000+ who responded to an email I sent out a few months ago asking if they plan to present about wikis. (They presented in places like Maine, Malaysia, and Texas — see pictures.) Others are just casual users who want to show their friends what a wiki is. Sometimes, employees in big companies want to communicate the idea of a wiki to their boss.

For everyone, we’ve developed the PBwiki Presenter Packs, which include videos, how-to guides, and more. Until now, you had to sign up to get them (and if you want a free PBwiki t-shirt, you should still sign up).

But now you can download the PBwiki Presenter Pack materials and use them for free right here. Enjoy!

-Ramit

Cindy Lane, an instructional technologist, recently presented at an educational event about PBwiki using our Presenter Packs. Her giveaway was one of the most creative we’ve seen!

Yesterday was my pbwiki event…Half of my teachers had actually gone on and logged in and had contributed to the wiki, so I pulled them up front, gave them each TWO packages of 100 calorie peanut butter cookies and told them to find a teacher that had NOT logged on and teach them how, (and give them a package of cookies).

The big prize (peanut butter stuffed pretzels) went to the first person who had logged on, the Project Peanut Butter rubber bracelet went to the last person that logged on…and the three gold wiki keys (coming my way soon I hope!) went to the first two teachers that emailed me (both did this within the following 2 minutes).

Thanks for taking care of my teachers…as you can see, I love ‘em too!! and P B W I K I !!!

Cindy even included a video for her educators:

Click To Play

To get your own PBwiki Presenter Pack (including a free t-shirt, white papers to give to your audience, and 3 free Gold wikis to give away–click here.

Are you trying to view our PBwiki videos but your work or school is blocking YouTube?

Don’t worry, we’ve uploaded all of the PBwiki videos to TeacherTube. TeacherTube is a great video site that doesn’t appear to be blocked by most employers and educational institutions. It’s completely safe for work and has other helpful videos and tutorials for both educators and students.

Take a look at the PBwiki videos on TeacherTube.

Here’s a PBwiki video uploaded on TeacherTube that has educators covering their favorite features on PBwiki.

St. Francois Xavier Community School is using PBwiki as the school’s website for students, parents, and faculty. It’s been a smooth integration for them with a lot of things learned through the way. John Evans, the administrator of sfxschool.pbwiki.com spent sometime with us to go over his experience with PBwiki.

PBwiki: What’s sfxschool.pbwiki.com about?
John Evans: sfxschool.pbwiki.com is our school web page. I’ve taken the information that I had for several years on a free hosting site and moved it over to PBwiki because I liked the ease of editing and contributing it allowed myself as the admin, as well as the freedom it gave the teachers and students who would be able to make contributions to the wiki.

PBwiki: How do you use your PBwiki?
John Evans: Similar to the response above, we are using the wiki as our website primarily for its ease of use, and the levels of access available to a multitude of users. Currently only the professional staff in our school has authorization to post on the wiki. With further training, my expectation is that staff will begin to use the wiki with their students at least in grades 4 - 6.

I have also created two other wikis for training in Literacy with Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
(http://joevans.pbwiki.com) and for Teacher Wellness
(http://wellteacher.pbwiki.com)

PBwiki: Why’d you choose PBwiki?
John Evans: PBWiki was the wiki of choice for several colleagues of mine teaching ICT to staff and students. I looked at others and felt PBWiki was the easiest to use. I originally thought wikis would be hard to use but taught myself the basics in about an hour by looking at the code of other wikis, saw the potential and took off from there.
PBwiki: How many people are active on your wiki?

John Evans: See Above for our school wiki users. I have several other free wikis that I have had students in grade 4 work on. The first group last year at http://rockhound.pbwiki.com did some great stuff for their first time working with a wiki. They were really pumped with the content they produced and proudly showed it off to their parents.

PBwiki: What has been the biggest surprise for you in using PBwiki?
John Evans: While not really a surprise, the best part was when teachers say to me “You mean I don’t have to wait for a week or more to have the IT guy approve my website before they add it to the school site? I can do it myself!”

In our latest series of training with K-8 teachers on wikis we had planned a half day, but teacher were so into it we allowed them to have the whole day. When I asked one of the originally reluctant teachers what they liked most about the day, she excitedly said “Wikis! I LOVE Wikis!!”

PBwiki: Would you tell others about PBwiki?
John Evans: I use PBWiki in all the workshop training we do in our school division. It’s easy, straight forward and now with the new editor should be even easier to use. I rave about PBWiki all the time to other teachers.

PBwiki: Have you used our new Point-and-Click editor? What are you thoughts on it?
John Evans: …I like the new plug-ins you’ve included. I will be looking at it this week as I prepare for our divisional SY Technology training session on Friday.

PBwiki: With so many people contributing to your wiki is it difficult to manage?
John Evans: When I had the free version of the wiki, I had one student who maliciously changed the pages of other students in his class. He was in grade 4 and followed my instructions to login so he was easily tracked and discovered. This is why I went to the upgraded version of PBWiki purchasing a Silver package for the school. The various login levels make it safer for everyone, including teachers who are more leery of the technology.

PBwiki: How long did it take to implement PBwiki at St. François Xavier?
John Evans: It took me about 2 weeks time - a bit here and there to transfer all my materials over to the wiki. Now things are so easy to maintain. I subscribe to the various pages in my RSS aggregator and I can see whose made changes and if necessary make corrections or edits. I really like the lockable pages that came with the Gold upgrade which I received in the presenter’s package. We’re still technically in the implementation stage as our staff is still learning how to do things with the wiki. Our next session is going to be on uploading images and files. Though it is easy, if staff don’t do it on a regular basis they soon forget.

I spoke to a room of educators last week in Detroit at the MACUL conference.

At first, I was nervous because I didn’t know how many people would attend the talk! But in the end, it turned out to be a lot of fun — and by the end, we had a standing-room-only event! I spoke for about 45 minutes, then answered questions and gave away a few PBwiki t-shirts. We need to get more of those shirts out through our Presenter Packs! (If you’re an educator giving a talk about wikis anywhere in the country, check out the details.)

Kevin Clark, who attended the talk, wrote up a great description of the talk called Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.

So…I think it’s really cool that Ramit Sethi, the VP of Marketing for PBwiki, has come all the way here to give us the latest on what PBwiki is all about. I think it demonstrates some commitment from them that they want to reach out to educators.

[…]

They took the suggestions of educators and listened. Teachers hate ads, so they removed them on educational blogs. They want students to be engaged, so they continue to add features. They also want it to be easy, so they made a new WYSIWYG editor. They’re trying to listen to their hundreds of users and incorporating their suggestions.

[…]

For those of you who use PBwiki (or just wikis in general!) and tell others in workshops, PBwiki offers Presenter Packs which include

• a PDF handout with general PBwiki information
• a T-shirt of your choice
• a PowerPoint presentation to use in your workshop/session
• and three PBwiki upgrades (worth $750)

[…]

Again, I’m really impressed by the approachability of Ramit, and through him, PBwiki. These guys (actually five guys and a gal) are really trying to get it right and to create a useful tool for educators as well as the web community in general. Keep in mind…Ramit wasn’t down in the vendor area and wasn’t pushing his product (you get the Presenter Pack no matter what type of wiki you’re focusing on), but instead is extending a hand to teachers to help create meaningful online content and collaborative activities.

In his full post, Kevin also writes about what’s coming next for PBwiki, as well as some common concerns about using wikis that we’ve heard from educators. Check out the full post: Behind the Scenes with PBwiki.

Over the last three months we’ve been offering our users PBwiki presenter packs. If you’re interested in giving a presentation about PBwiki (or Web 2.0 technologies in general) we’d love to ship you our presenter pack. It’s free!

The presenter pack includes:

Here’s a couple of pictures of the goodies from our presenter packs, courtesy of our PBwiki users.

Check out our PBwiki Presenter Pack page for more information on how to obtain the presenter pack.

Here’s a special 2-page PDF that answers basic questions about PBwiki, specifically for educators. Some questions answered:

• What’s the difference between a wiki and a blog?
• Who controls the content?
• Is it easy to use? What about safety?
• What are examples of successful educational wikis?

This might be perfect if your IT administrator or principal has been wondering exactly what a wiki is. Ask them to read these quick 2 pages!

Read the PDF here: Q&A about PBwiki
-Ramit