Pbwiki Ready to Help Public Schools

Dave Nagel over at TheJournal.com is reporting that collaborative technology developer PBwiki has announced $25 million in new grant programs for education, offering free upgrades to its hosted wiki service and other awards.

Back To School Challenge will allow up to 100,000 teachers and librarians to earn a free gold-level PBwiki account, which usually costs about $250. Other prizes include a $1,000 gift certificate for purchasing school supplies, Lego educational products, and games.

The Partner Program for Education allows districts and associations to offer free PBwiki gold accounts to members.

“With schools and libraries feeling the pinch of the slowing economy, PBwiki wants to make sure educators can still afford the tools they need to make 2008-2009 the year of collaborative learning,” said PBwiki CEO Jim Groff in a statement released this week. “Giving away 100,000 premium wikis lets us help out and spread wiki-based collaboration to an even wider audience.”

Both programs are open now through Oct. 31. Go for it!

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

How to Spend Your Summer Vacation

web-20.jpgIf you’re still not sure how to “break in” to the Web 2.0 world — through blogging, eNewsletters, social bookmarking, using online document systems or other ways — you might want to follow the advice that educational tech expert and blogger Wesley Fryer recently gave a group of teachers in a one-hour after-school staff development workshop. Realizing that many of the teachers in his audience had not heard of Web 2.0 technology and would be overwhelmed if he tried to cover it all in the time he had, Fryer suggested that they take small steps by investigating a few of Web 2.0 tools and using them “personally” over the summer. I like his suggestions, so I’m sharing them with you. If you’re a school official or a school communications professional, you might consider attacking it this way. Even if you’re a 12-month employee, summers provide most of us with time to catch up on some knowledge. (#3 and #5 are specifically geared toward teacher software, so you might want to skip those.)

1. Join a local (state) online learning community.
2. Learn about wikis and create one.
3. Create and share digital stories with VoiceThread.
4. Start using social bookmarking.
5. Join an online professional learning community like Classroom 2.0, and attend the 2007 K-12 Online Conference.
6. Share photos with family and friends on Flickr.
7. Watch and share outstanding videos online.
8. Videoconference with family and friends using Skype or iChat.
9. Create and read a customized digital “newspaper”. (With Google Reader.)
10. Learn to text message from a patient teenager.