If you were justing allowing them to edit as guests, I can see the problem, but for the next go-around, try having them create their own accounts, or setup a class account for each section. That’s what I’ve done, and now I can use those same 12 accounts (one for each section of 4th grade) throughout the year if I want to make a new wiki for another project.

We’re sorry to hear we contributed to what sounds like a very rough day. Here are a few things we’ve got in store at Wikispaces we think will help a lot:

1. Allowing guest page creations. This makes good sense. We’ll add it as an option in the manage space section, defaulting to “off”. The reason we haven’t had this in the past is that it’s something spammers pounce on — but with active space organizers and our spam protection systems, we think it will be useful for many wikis.

2. Account creation for schools. Every week, we create thousands of accounts on behalf of teachers for students who don’t have email addresses. Right now, we do this based on requests sent to us, but we’ve got plans to streamline this process for organizers. We want you to be able to create 20 accounts for your wiki in a heartbeat — ideally, in the time it takes to go from Plan A to Plan B while your students are in the room.

3. Our editor. We’ve got some frequently-requested formatting features we’re testing right now. We think you’ll love them, and find they fill some gaps without making the editor overly complicated (or slow!).

As always, we’re here to help and listen to any suggestions you might have: help@wikispaces.com. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to thousands of passionate people like you — a huge percentage of them teachers — who tell us where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do better.

Best,
James
jbyers@wikispaces.com

You must be exhausted from all the dancing you did today. It does explain what happened to me a few weeks ago. During training, I had a group of teachers access a public Wikispace. I had set up a link for each teacher and expected them to choose from a template to finish creating the page. They all had access issues. The following day I preset all the pages and they just edited and it was fine. I hadn’t taken time to explore it much further. This seems to bear out my suspicion that you had to be a member to add a page.

I do like the look and feel of Wikispaces better than PBwiki, but agree their WISIWYG editor is not as full featured. They’re developing all the time, so hopefully once the bleeding edge smooths out we’ll be in much better shape.

It’s stressful at best in these situations. I guess that’s why some teachers are so reluctant to touch technology unless necessary. Have a good evening!

Ann

I’m sorry you had such a pain with PBwiki logins. We heard from a lot of teachers that they wanted to know exactly who was on the wiki – and so we created a login process that necessitated entering in a name (be it real or fake).

Our work around for teachers who work with young students – or just want their students on the site asap – is to suggest using a fake email address. It sounds like this wasn’t the best solution for the youngest of students who aren’t sure even how to type in an email address.

Please email me at Kristine -at- pbwiki.com with your ideas on how to bridge the gap between allowing everyone on the wiki and making sure that teachers can account for who is on the wiki & when they were on the wiki. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Also – I thought the wikipedia article tactic was a great work-around. It does sound like you had a tough day.

Kristine