coachboyer's dashboard

It would be nice to have some color options in 2.0 that last more than only 3 hours. The ability to add a little originality to everyone's wiki is always good.

I use PB wiki with multiple users all of the time. The trick is to give each user or team separate pages. Set up the individual pages and then use your SIDEBAR to create links to the pages. Then, users will be able to access the pages, no matter where they are on the wiki.

If you have multiple assignments, you can name them A-1, A-2, A-3, B-1, B-2, B3, C-1, C-2, C-3 etc., where 1 is always the same team.

Today one of my 5th grade pullout groups was meeting in the lab. We are using a several-day-old free v1.x wiki that is private. The lock hit us in a new way: (sorry for the long message!)
1. I made a new page called "Vocabulary" and saved.
2. I navigated to and clicked on the sidebar tab of the Side Bar.
3. Clicked edit and typed the text "Vocabulary", then added "Johnny Tremain" right below the page title.
4. Opened the "Insert Link" dialog on that new sidebar page. Linked to the WikiPage named "Johnny Tremain" just made. Asked that the text of the link be "Johnny Tremain"
5. I must have saved the resulting page. Went back out to the Front Page, checked the link - it worked.
-I did this work on one of the lab computers

-Reviewed with everyone how the Side Bar worked while they sat at their computers; I assume that some of the students went to the linked "Johnny Tremain" page as I described it. Then I gathered them around one student CPU to demonstrate collaboration by taking turns editing. All others closed their wikis.
BUT-- when the student at this demonstration CPU navigated to the Vocab page for "Johnny Tremain" we were stopped by the lock message saying that one of the students had a lock and it would be available in five minutes. She said she had not been editing, and of course this may not be true, but I looked as I asked and the page was not being edited. We waited 30 seconds and it was still locked. I asked her to log off and quit her browser. She did so but the lock was not released. The message did change to tell us "4 minutes to wait." I gave up as we'd reached the end of our session.

Are there still conditions that will cause this beyond simple editing collisions? Is there sometimes a lag of several minutes before status update? Does refresh the page clear the status quickly if I think the editing "session" is now over? (This can just be an errant click on the Edit button by a student.)

I still think that having a big wiki with lots of places to edit for projects will help, but we'll have to teach the kids to self-manage some of this. Just takes longer to get to a productive state. In my community there are (relatively) more sessions in these groups all at one time as most of the kids don't have access at home.

I know I will appreciate anything pbWiki can do to help us learn teaching tactics for more productivity with the wiki in the lab setting for elementary.

Now I just wish my guys were faster typists!

Jonathan

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for your ideas.

1) I encourage you to tag pages. Get Satisfaction is working to make page tags more accessible - so finding information should be easier in the future.

2) More information on our edit lock policy is located here: http://tinyurl.com/2hpfry.

3) One Note may be a great idea if you really need simultaneous editing -- why don't you write about it on the edu portal. I created a section for you here: https://educators.pbwiki.com/OneNote2007

Thanks!
Kristine

Yes, if each student is editing a different page, they should be able to do it at the same time.

It does now. Thanks!

The link works fine!

Aww... sorry that you had to go to so much trouble to get you page to look the way you want. Glad that you finally got it working!

Moja, Susan,
This is new to me, too, and I wish it didn't act so powerfully as a showstopper. From my experience taking the class (5th) to the computer lab to work on the wiki, I know I have to create separate areas of the site for people to work on during that session. So I'll teach them to go past the pages that act as directories and do their editing on the distributed, individual areas. If two students are going to work together, it has to be arranged so that one finishes and the other is alerted to open the page for their part of the work. the editing locks really slow down the class, because some of the kids will sit and wait doing nothing while the red-lettered message is up.

So site design should help. pbWiki, we need to make it easier for educators to share. The messages with ideas are scattered throughout the Satisfaction site now. (Perhaps tag searches will help find them...)

OneNote2007 (ON2007) is an inexpensive Microsoft app that allows simultaneous editing on a page. That page can be saved as a web page for all to see after the simultaneous session. ON is less than $50 to educators. I use it as an individual so have never tried the simultaneous editing. This software is a great for teachers in general, by the way. Check it out.

Jonathan

Re: the last comment from coachboyer
"I use pbwiki for my classroom as well. I have set up a page for each student that they can get on and edit."
Does this mean that if a student has his/her own individual page in a wiki then he/she is able to edit the page at the same time that someone else is editing their page?

I tried deleting the images and then adding some new back in. That seemed to work. Not the best looking site, but no gaps in it. Thanks to everyone for the help!

That didn't work either. I even deleted the images and no luck. The text moved up, but the gap is still there.

Hey there, it looks like the problem might be that the images you are including are breaking up the blocks of text. Try right clicking on an image, select "Image Properties" then select "Left" from the dropdown box labeled "Align".

Hope that works for you!

Well, I'm trying to be like the Big Brother who helps children and not the Big Brother circa 1984 who imprisons everyone for thinking about revolutionary thoughts.

Trying to be your concierge, sir (or madam, as the case may be).

No problem! Sorry if were down for a few. I have cleaned this up so one question is showing. Thanks for your patience!

Sorry didn't realize this posted three times. Got an error message telling me that Get Satisfaction was temporarily down and to hit the back arrow. That's the only thing I can think of. Not intentional.

I use pbwiki for my classroom as well. I have set up a page for each student that they can get on and edit.