February 11, 2019 · personal

PBWiki: Throwback to 2008

Back when I was a student in Grade 5, I remember there was a large push within our elementary school to embrace the newest technologies that could improve education. Our school had heavily invested in projectors, smart boards, laptop carts, and desktop upgrades. The school librarians also helped push web technologies to the teachers, promoting a service called PBWiki (later renamed to PBWorks). PBWiki was an easy-to-use Wiki that allowed people without any technical knowledge to publish documents to the web. PBWiki was powerful and allowed for collaboration between multiple users, and for the teachers, PBWiki was advertised as a simple platform to publish homework deadlines, guidelines, and interesting links for the students.

During that year, my friend and I helped set up a PBWiki for our Grade 5 teacher and became experienced in PBWiki management. Since we were friends with the school librarians at the time, they recommended that we create a small how-to guide for teachers who are looking to set up a new PBWiki for their classroom. I had completely forgotten about this until a few weeks ago, when I stumbled upon the presentation that we had given to the teachers. From the file modification date, we had presented to them in December of 2008! I've uploaded the presentation as a PDF, and there is an embedded preview below.

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