I love finding new things – this time I found a new thing on the wiki designed by one of my friend/colleague’s daughters, Elise. She is ten years old and a little while ago, decided she would create her own wiki. My friend says, “She’s working on it all the time” and that he’s really not sure what it is all about but he is really proud of her and her efforts and yesterday he had the opportunity to share her wiki with me. She is using Wetpaint, the one wiki program I haven’t investigated very much, though I know it is usually listed as the third in the trio of wikis, PBwiki, Wikispaces and Wetpaint. I know that educators have special opportunities with PBwiki and Wikispaces but at first glance, I didn’t see anything obvious for educators with Wetpaint – perhaps an option appears when you are going through the registration process.
When investigating Elise’s wiki, I learned about a new “quick poll” tool that she uses to survey her visitors’ interests. The tool is, Vizu and it offers users the opportunity to, “Add an interactive poll to a web page or blog post in seconds. Customize the look to match your site.” Vizu also has a “Power Poll” feature which allows one to, “Make polling a feature of your site or blog. Automatically rotate numerous, professional looking polls. Add your own polls.” I am thinking about many ways this little tool (or one like it as I am sure there are many) could be used in the classroom… opinions on current events, favorite character polls, what do you think will happen next, what do you think the outcome of this experiment will be… I think I’m going to spend my Friday Five exploring Vizu, putting one up on my wiki as a practice, and dreaming a little about where quick/informal polls would fit well into my curriculum.
With that, I am off to work more on the PowerPoint game project, I achieved success with VBA at least on the PC side of PowerPoint so that is encouraging! Maybe next week I’ll be luck enough to be able to say I am finished with the project!? (I probably shouldn’t write that but I am going to dream anyway!) I hope you have a great day and weekend.
ps – I’ll ask Elise if I can share her wiki with you and will post a link if she says yes.
No Time to Sleep 
Actually, yes, educators can go to http://www.wetpaint.com/category/Education–Ad-Free and sign up to have their ads removed.
We’re very proud of our educators and work very hard with them to get them the best service we can give.
If you have any questions about it, I’m on twitter as Troy_Wetpaint!