BP9 PBWorks

PBWorks is a wiki site that is absolutely perfect for teachers that want to set up an online class. The level of customization is awesome for teachers. After watching some of the tutorials, I’ve learned that I can set up the main page as my course outlook or syllabus. I can invite my students to my pbworks site and give them permission to edit pages, which is perfect for creating notes pages or working on a class document. The only problem is now that they have edit privileges, they can edit my syllabus. This problem is resolved by clicking the “key” at the right side of the page. I can then select an option to only give the administrator access to edit. The major downside to this is that the option is only available if you’re paying the $99/year subscription. This is actually one site that I would consider doing that for if I had sufficient student computer access. Another feature that I really liked about PBWorks is the sidebar. The sidebar is part of the navigation menu that takes up the right quarter of the screen. In the sidebar, you can put a link, or text, or photo, or anything else you want and it will stay visible no matter what page you edit. The other features that stay on the right quarter are the Navigator, which allows you to quickly go from page to page, and the Recent Activity, which shows who did what to each page. This is helpful because it allows you to see what students made changes. I still haven’t figured out if there is a nice way to list the student names and show how many changes they made but this wiki tool is a research in progress. I look forward to learning more about it’s capabilities and determining if it’s truly worth paying the $99/year for greater access and control.