Barry Bakin's dashboard

I think the new option of creating student accounts for students without emails is great. Before you introduced this, I had to let students all share one account, and I couldn't tell which one made a change. It's also great having the flexibility to add people three different ways in one wiki. The one additional enhancement I would like would be the option to change a password once the user is entered.

School starts in just a few weeks. Any updates? – Anne-Marie, on August 03, 2008 21:46

Hi, Val. This is a top priority for us, but I can't say it'll be ready by the end of July. We're working around a Fall start to the school year. If you need to set a wiki up for your students by end of July, I'd suggest sticking to a 1.0 wiki. – Janet Yu, on July 22, 2008 19:47

yes, classroom accounts, please!!! i'm cutting it close; school starts at the end of july for hawaii. i want to be able to know what i'm doing so i can teach the students how to use the wiki.... – val, on July 20, 2008 03:07

You might look into gaggle.net as an email provider that is accessible from schools since no accounts are "secret." Everything is viewable by administrators and teachers and filtered in both directions (in-going and out-going mail) with key words diverting inbound and outbound messages into the teacher's mailbox so they can be reviewed before arriving at their destinations. There's a free version (with school appropriate advertisers) as well as pay versions without the advertising. Account management isn't very burdensome and it's fairly easy to sign up students individually or in batches (even faster). You're not telling your students they "have to have an email to do some work," you're providing them with one that is suitable for school use.

I am looking forward to the solution. I have used PBwiki for a couple of years with high school students. Even High School kids do not have emails, so 1.0 with password was great. They also needed to give their name at login so we know who did work.

BTW I was looking into an online CMS that would have wiki as part of it but cannot use it because it would require students to create an account. We are just not ready to require students to create an online presence that is accessible to the public. Telling them they have to have an email to do some of their work is very similar. Though most already have email, facebook, myspace, we CANNOT require it.

So what is the answer?

Hi Janet,

As a former elementary teacher, I think that's a great idea. I also think it will resolve the concerns I was having about using PBwiki for conferences and presentations. – Elizabeth, on July 17, 2008 20:34

Thanks -- looking forward to the solution.

We know our primary school teachers are really left out of PBwiki 2.0 since many of their students don't have email accounts. We're working on a feature that addresses this by allowing teachers to easily generate "classroom accounts" that don't require email accounts. We hope this will allow more of you to try out the great new features in PBwiki 2.0!

We also understand that teachers need to make their plans before the school year starts, so we're aiming to roll this feature out well in advance of the coming school year.

Sorry end of school year and family issues kept me from responding.
Are we still discussing this? Is there a link to a page to review the new ideas? I'm still hoping for the invite key/ one password. I included pbwiki in my fourth quarter writing class. Being able to change the wiki password daily made it so easy to manage. I don't think I could have done managed without it because I have four classes and 70 students to manage. Until the kids understand and follow their responsibility and the ethics involved in internet use, I like the security of the password. Just checking; I'm sure a good solution will arise that will serve everyone's needs in some way. Thanks.

So this still hasn't been decided on yet. I did not make it to the presentations is there a way to view them now?

Hi, this is Janet Yu, Senior Product Manager at PBwiki. I'd love to talk through our proposed design for supporting classroom wikis in 2.0. Please email me this week at janet[dot]yu[at]pbwiki[dot]com if you're interested.

Hey all,

We've come up with a few options to fix the login problem and we'd like to get your feedback.

We are setting up short presentations on June 11, 2008 between 3:00 - 6:00 PDT. If you are interested in joining us to see our ideas on educator logins (for students without email address), please sign up here - http://tinyurl.com/6bxc7w

You will need to have access to a phone and an internet connection.

Thanks!
Kristine

If you create custom userspaces for wikis or general no-password logins or magic URLS that create unique logins (or whatever the solution) do you think that you'll make this support available for any wiki that wants it, or do you think that easy no-signup-required access will just be for educators?

test – Rachel Pennig, on May 29, 2008 19:34

I like the idea of an option at setup, as another person described above. There are times when an invite key is appropriate - when the invitee does not need their own wiki username/password. At other times, the email access option is extremely useful. – Teresa W., on May 16, 2008 13:16

I like this idea best. The decision can then be based on what the wiki or assignment entails. – Teresa W., on May 16, 2008 13:11

David, wow, a whole hour? I participated in one of the online conf calls in early March. (Also about an hour.) We were told that some exciting things were being developed and were to be released 'soon'. I convinced people here to pay for the nice PB license based on the many 1.0 wikis that we had and now I'm feeling the pressure since the easiest part of group teacher training is gone (invite key).

I don't assume that it's an easy thing to fix, but there has been months of feedback and PB needs to make any change they are going to make or stick with the decisions already made so we can choke on our money and find the other alternatives we need.

While we're working on this, I'd be nice if account login could set different notifications for different wikis. I'd rather hear from some once a day and others immediately. It's a pain, but not a deal-breaker.

I use my PB's and enjoy the simplicity of use. I have 4th graders tearing through pages and adding media content easily. There are so many good things about PB. But if it's a pain to get teachers trained in large groups, I will have to go elsewhere. There are so many other alternatives.

Thank you for the update. I realize this is a difficult problem to solve and would like to say that I appreciate the effort PBWiki is putting into finding the right solution. – Carolyn, on May 09, 2008 11:59

Hi! A couple of people have asked why we didn't just put invite keys into 2.0. After all "the code exists", right?

The issue is that 1.0 had a lot of very different ways to get into a wiki. The login page itself became very confusing (are you logging in with an invite key? Or a user account?) and we couldn't make guarantees about exactly who had done exactly what on the wiki. This generated a lot of support requests and it just wasn't a good, simple, "peanut buttery" solution. We tried several different iterations of login screen to see if we could message the dual systems more clearly, but this generally didn't pan out.

When designing 2.0 the team therefore made a decision to first have a unified and simplified login system that just asks for a username and a password. We recognized that this wouldn't solve the needs of everyone in 1.0 and that therefore we'd need to put some time into thinking about ways we could have our cake and eat it too to get to a place where we had a system effective for educators.

I appreciate the intensity on this thread. It's quite clear from the volume and passion that you want the 2.0 features and a mechanism to get students in that's as straightforward as an invite key. Some very specific and very helpful suggestions have been put forth on this thread that we'll be taking into account.

Just so you guys know, this is one of the very top issues at the company - all of the company managers got together for over an hour today (with this GS thread on the projector) to discuss how we were going to resolve this. We are determined to get you a timely solution that meets your needs.

Our apologies for the bumps along the way as we grow and work to provide you with the best wiki solution ever. Thank you for your patience.