Rob Barth, an attendee of some of the sessions I did at METC over the past couple of days, shared a web site that enables us to compare various wiki tools. The site, WikiMatrix, lists dozens of wiki farms and wiki engines, from which you select the ones you want to compare. Both PBWiki and Wikispaces are included, as is WetPaint — three tools that I hear mentioned in education circles quite frequently.
This could be quite useful, as I’m sure we all get questions about which wiki to use with my class. The only potential down side with this site, is that it provides a lot of information, too much for some.
Email Citation:
Barth, Robert. “Wiki Matrix, METC Session.” E-mail to David Warlick.5 Feb 2008.
I highly recommend EditMe as it mimics a word processor quite wonderfully with a full rich-text editor. It even has various posting tools, so you don’t have to clean up messy formatting when you copy and paste from Word or some other program. It also has automatic indexing of pages, which is a nice feature for using wikis with younger students that don’t quite understand the difference between creating a page and having to create a link to it (something my 4th graders don’t always understand while shouting “Mr. Rimes, my page dissappeared, I can’t find the link!” after creating a new page.)
Unfortunately, the slickness of EditMe comes at a price….no free options (which make PBWiki and Wikispaces so popular), with hosting starting around 10 dollars a month.
How can you possibly beat Wikispaces for Teachers? Free for 100,000? I do respect their attempt to make the technology cheap and accessible to teachers.
It also seems to me, since there are constant upgrades, that they are listening to recommendations for improvements to the tool.
Randall: I’ve been using Wikispaces for more than 2 years now, and the constant upgrades that you speak of have been rather difficult for me to see. Whereas, a social networking site like Ning.com, not only do they have a regular update every few months, but I can also see the immediate changes and improvements they’ve made. With Wikispaces, and I want to be clear that I’m in no way denigrating their services, I haven’t noticed any improvements other than the new “floating editing bar”. Then again, I might not be looking hard enough.