In a recent post about the five tips to help teachers battle a tighter budget we mentioned the use of Wikis. In the comments, Josh clued me in to a service called wetpaint. He was also nice enough to let me join his to try things out. Thanks Josh.

I know Wikispaces is big, but I’m a big fan of Wetpaint for wikis. It’s not as clean as Wikispaces, but I do think it’s easier to use, especially for students.
Great ideas! -Josh

So I checked it out to see just how easy it was. In this post we’ll check out some wetpaint’s best features, and then walk you through the simple steps for getting one started for your classroom.

The Features

One of the simplest features of wetpaint is by far the Easy Edit button. At any page within the wiki, you can press the easy edit button, making the entire page editable as is. Some wikis will give you a text box to do your page edits in, but this feature is more of a wysiwyg style so there is no guess work in how the page will look when you get done. It also includes a fairly detailed toolbar for formatting your text.

View of Easy Edit Toolbar

Security Through Permissions

Teachers will be glad to know that not only can they make the wiki editable by only the people(students) they invite, but permissions are also available. Which means that certain privileges can be reserved for thosethat you feel can handle them.

No Edits are Anonymous

Nothing can be done anonymously if you have your permissions set to allow only registered users to edit. Any time that something is changed(added OR deleted) it gets recorded in the whats new page with the name of the user that made the edit.

Since teachers aren’t able to keep students from posting through an approval process, it is at least nice to know that nothing can be done anonymously.-which is probably a bigger lesson for them to learn in the long run anyway.

No Ads for Educators

Upon checking out wetpaint for the first time, I noticed ads scattered around the page. Knowing that a lot of schools frown on the idea of being associated with a site whose content they can’t control. wetpaint, however does allow for registration of an adless educational wiki through a submission process. Part 2 of this series will walk you through how to set up a wiki for your classroom.

Check out Josh’s blog at http://techfridge.blogspot.com/ OR follow him on twitter @j_allen