I am HAPPY! I hope you are too.

Going to keep this short because I only have 2 hours to check out all my wikis so I don't want to spend all my time yacking on here. I'll talk on here another time, i want to spend mucho time on the wikis so the students know I'm serious about it.

Some short points: I have ALMOST all my students fill out the survey form. A couple didn't. Boo.

PBWiki has lots of cool toys but I found that many have ad links for stupid spam MySpace crap sites. I emailed them and they apologized but said it's the deal they have with the widget people. So that sucks. I talked to all my classes about it and my kids have found ways to put the chat program on the site without ads (I have some crackerjack future hackers). The chat program is ONLY for everyone who is currently logged on PBWIKI so they can talk if they're on. It's good so far.

Same thing with music. They have dumb ads. But my @#$()*& kids have figured out a way to put music on without ads. God bless them.

This week each class went over what kinds of things I need to look for when I grade these. As something new, and because I got into a great discussion with my AP out the merits of rubrics (she hates them and thinks they're one reason our kids only strive for mediocrity), I decided we're going to come up with what everyone needs to do the BARE minimum. The rubric will be for a 70 (C-). i.e. this is what you need to have on your wiki to barely pass. I'll keep you posted on that one.

I have it set up so that I get updates on the hour. I have it piped into my special Outlook folder. It's so coool. I want to hug PBWiki. So far I would say 70-80 percent of my students play with their wikis at least once a day.

Kids are doing what I asked them to do this week: get on, play around with it, and get in contact with the other students in their civilization. EVERY STUDENT HAS DONE THIS.

I set up a helper elf chart on front page today and asked those HTML students who want to volunteer to help with the little things (background colors, videos, etc) can sign up so everyone knows who the experts are. This is the smartest thing I've done thus far.

I am extremely and absolutely happy with the way things are going so far. I'm going to wait a week before I give YOU the link. Some are almost viewer-worthy, most are still in their infancy stage.

Bye bye bye!