Wikispaces has been a great supporter of classrooms for years now. They allow any teacher to use their services to create wikis for free and without advertising. Today, Wikispaces introduced a brand new look for classroom wikis.

Wikispaces Classroom is a new, free offering from Wikispaces. From the first look you’ll notice that Wikispaces Classroom is quite different from the old Wikispaces format. Wikispaces Classroom simplifies the layout of pages to put only the tools students need in order to edit a page on display and hides the tools students don’t need. On the management side of things Wikispaces Classroom is arranged to make it easy for teachers to quickly manage projects, alter settings, and see reports on students’ use of the wiki.

Wikispaces is offering some free webinars about the new Wikispaces Classroom. You can get more information about those webinars here. 


Applications for Education
Last year I wrote 5 Ways You Can Use Wikis With Students. Included in that list is creating digital reference pages as alternatives to textbooks. That was one of my primary uses of wikis when I taught a ninth grade geography class that didn’t have a current textbook. I often started a set of pages and had students finish the pages. The new Wikispaces Classroom has a tool that I wish I had then to quickly see not only when students accessed pages, but also what they did on the pages.