I’ve used Wikispaces for years. I’ve appreciated their teacher-friendly willingness to set up accounts for students who don’t have email addresses (or who are under age 13 so are prevented by COPA from creating their own accounts.) I’ve loved their program to give away ad-free wikis to teachers. I’ve steered numerous teachers to consider Wikispaces.
However, many times, teachers would check it out and then disregard it because there were no text formatting options. What’s a class poetry wiki without the ability to center text? What fun are color poems when you can’t change text color?
Fortunately, those are now problems of the past because Wikispaces has added a text formatting toolbar that allows you to to easily change the color, style, size, alignment, and background color of your text.
I know my students will greatly appreciate these new formatting options. I see them as a blessing and a curse. They will allow us to make the pages more user-friendly, but they also allow the children yet another tool in which they can focus on style over substances. For some classes, the lack of options helped kids keep on task.
What do you think? Does the new text formatting toolbar affect your likelihood of using Wikispaces? Does it make you more or less likely to use it?
To be honest, the new formating is a pain if you want to copy and paste into the wikispace…I have to save my documents as txt files and then copy over and redo the headers and formating. I must be doing something wrong! It was very simple where there was just one font!!