PBwiki was at the top of my 2007 list of web tools. It slipped a bit in the past year, not because I think it is any less of a useful tool than it was previously, but only because I was using it less myself during the past year. No particular reason for using it less, except that there are so many different tools that I use and it just turned out that this was not the year of the wiki for me. It was, however, a good year for PBwiki as they released a new version (PBwiki 2.0) with an updated interface and new features.
PBwiki is still one of the most popular tools in many of the Web 2.0 workshops that I conduct each year. They still are very educator-friendly by offerings advertising-free wikis for educational uses and being pretty generous by giving away many of their premium upgrades. They say that they have over 250,000 educators using PBwiki. That sounds pretty significant to me.
Quoting myself from an earlier submission to Jane Hart’s Top Tools site: “I almost stopped using wikis about a year ago, but PBwiki brought me back with all kinds of new plug-ins and added functionality, plus it is ad-free for educators” Barry Dahl
A couple of fun facts taken from Wikipedia include: a) Jim Groff, a former employee of Oracle Corporation and Apple Inc. is now the CEO of PBwiki, b) over 1,000 wikis were created during the first 48 hours after the June 2005 launch, and c) several companies and education institutions are apparently using PBwiki as a document management system.
Some useful links:
- My video for embedding PBwiki inside your VLE (D2L is shown)
- Follow their blog called The Daily Peanut
- Follow Krissy from PBwiki on Twitter
- Quotes about PBwiki on Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools site (includes a drunken monkey reference)
- YouTube playlist of 6 videos: PBwiki – Helping Educators Educate
- Visit the PBwiki forums for answers to questions
- There is a fan club, if you’re interested
- There’s an educator’s portal for PBwiki users
Filed under: Web2.0 | Tagged: PBwiki, Web2.0 | 1 Comment »
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