H.++WIKI+Nuts+and+Bolts

**The Nuts and Bolts of Creating a WIKI** Creating your first field trip wiki can be either fun or frustrating. To make it fun, it helps to understand how some of the basic features of a wiki work. Here is a brief tutorial about a few of the most useful features of your WikiSpaces wiki.

**Creating Your First Wiki:**

First of all you will want to open up a free educator's Wikispaces account. To do this click on this link: [] This account will give you access to a wiki with no advertisements and the ability to set it as private or public. For some added features you will need to pay for the premium version. Everything I have created on my wiki was done using a free educator's account!

While this training mainly deals with the use of wikis as a way to do a virtual field trip, there are many ways that wikis can help you in teaching. Here is a web article on 50 ways to use wikis in the classroom:

[]

**Editing Your New Wiki:** Once you have created your wiki, you can start editing it right away. First you need to click on the "Edit" icon. This icon can vary in appearance depending on the look and feel you choose. The edit icon for my wiki look like this:

Once you open up the edit function, you will see this toolbar: 

The tools in this part of the toolbar allow you to manipulate your text fonts, styles, and bullets:

This tool allows you to add web links to your page. These can be either internal links to other pages in your wiki or external links to other websites: 

You will use this tool more than just about any other. It is the "add file" tool. You use it to add any file from photos and pdfs, to videos, powerpoints, and Word documents.



This tool is what you will use to add any html code to your page. You will probably use this most when embedding webtools into your wiki.



This tool is for adding tables to your page. It is a very useful way to line up the different components of your page correctly.



<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Here is an example of a page aligned using the table tool.