Thing # 10 - Creating a Wiki

I actually finished this Thing before the class started. Part of my duties at work is to set up parent/teacher conferences for a gifted/talented program. This involved 80+ children from over 30 different schools setting up conference times 3 diff. nights for one of 7 teachers.

In past years, we have sent letters to all the parents and they have emailed/called me as I tried to work out schedules and set up a master list of conferences, and then called/emailed everyone back to confirm.

This year I developed a Wiki with separate pages for each teacher. I sent out a link to the parents with specific details on how to use the Wiki, and let them check what times were still available and schedule their own conference. What a time saver for me!!!! Almost everyone signed up fine, with me having to make less than 20 follow up calls. Next year I anticipate it going even better, as people get used to the process.

The PROS:

~ This saved me so much time!! The teachers could also go in and look at how their nights were shaping up instead of waiting for a report from me.....
~ Right before I launched this, PBWiki changed it's access policy to be completely open, so I didn't have to approve everyone for them to use it. This was really big, since I think it would have been annoying to have to wait for permission, and would have taken a lot of my time.
~ We now have a site people are used to going to if we want to keep up ongoing communication with the parents.

The CONS:
One big con is that EVERYONE who creates an account and joins the WIKI gets email notification everytime someone changes anything on the page - it even shows what changes were made. As parents said, they don't need to know every time someone else signs up, and all the emails could get annoying. I couldn't turn this feature off, they could but really didn't know how, and they might want to get some notifications for their page or general changes, but...

We thought about using this for ongoing communication, but again, everytime I changed a side bar, front page, note, etc. EVERYONE is notified. I'm not sure this is going to be feasible....

Time will tell. Here is a link to my simple but effective, efficient WIKI. However, since conferences are over, I no longer have the teacher pages on the front page, and it's hard to see how it was set up. If you want to visit individual pages, you will get the idea.