It wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that my favourite web tool for learning continues to be the wiki.  From a classroom resource and communicatuon center to a platform for student-produced content and collaboration, this tool is incredibly versatile and weaves so easily into the fabric of a flat classroom.

While there are several wiki farms providing free education wikis (e.g. Wetpaint, PB Wiki), my favourite (apologies to Jeff Utecht) continues to be Wikispaces.

There are many reasons for this, four of which stand them apart from the others – the fact that they provide free, fully functional wikis for K-12 education on-request, the ease and versatility of adding student accounts, the ability to lock out certain pages and have multiple editors on same pages,  and – most importantly – the HUGE file upload space available (2 GB per space!!, limit of 20 MB for any one file). Add this to what has to be the best service I have ever experienced from any company, and it’s a winner all around.

For the past couple of years, Adam Frey and the folks at Wikispaces have been promoting the use of wikis in education by giving away 100,000 free wikis to K-12 educators.  I am happy to say that they have reached the goal – well over 300 of them would be spaces from teachers I work with!!

Received this release from Wikispaces today – they don’t plan on stopping now!

To Adam, and the gang…keep it up!

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We just gave away our 100,000th free K-12 Wikispaces wiki! So we’re celebrating and announcing our new commitment to the education community.

Our K-12 program has been hugely rewarding for us. We have worked with hundreds of you every day, heard your stories of engaged students and excited teachers, and had the chance to meet some of you in
person. Working with you all has kept us excited about building a better Wikispaces service for you and many more teachers like you. Thank you for being part of our vibrant educational community, bringing innovative collaboration to your classroom, and giving us the feedback that has helped us improve our product along the way.

We are privileged to have served you, and we aren’t stopping here. Starting today, we are giving away 250,000 more free Plus wikis for K-12 education. As with the first 100K, our K-12 wikis come with
all the benefits of our Plus Plan – full privacy, no ads, a customizable look, our great customer service, and no usage limits.

We are also doubling our commitment to improve Wikispaces for teachers. We will be bringing you new features designed specifically to make your K-12 wikis easier to use, more productive, and more fun. And we’ll be hosting free live online events to share Wikispaces news, give short tutorials, showcase your success stories, answer your questions, and help you connect with others.

See our full announcement.

and join us in spreading the word and sharing your story.

Thank you,
Adam, Bisma, Dom, James, Jeff, Jessica, and Sarah

tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, wikispaces