Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Why a Peanut Butter Sandwich?

I've decided to use PBWorks to set up my wiki; I have used it before for courses in this program, and I've found it easy to navigate as a user.  I read in a couple of this week's articles that the "pb" stands for peanut butter, as in, "This site is as easy to use as making a peanut butter sandwich." Interesting choice. I do think PBWorks is pretty easy and intuitive to use, but I do find as both a user of wikis and now a creator of a wiki that this site can get bug-gy. In other words, sometimes it crashes while I'm trying to save (this must be a common problem because there's a link that keeps showing up that asks me to click on it if the page crashes while saving!). It's inconvenient, but easy enough to learn how to deal with. Just reload the page or click on the link to get to a saved version - easier to regain your work on PBWorks than on blogger, ahem. Also, I have found some delays or problems when editing: when I try to copy and paste from Word, my content often gets re-formatted and it is very hard to figure out how to format the work in a more attractive way. Sometimes when I try to change font sizes or styles it either refuses to make the change or the change kicks in about two lines later.
Aside from these minor glitches though I find it easy to add new pages, add links, and beginning a page is quite easy. I also like how they sent a welcome email to me that offered a free live webinar tutorial each month, and also not-live help sections that are always available. I like what I can get for free, and how, when I went to set up an educational page, the site offered me a bunch of template pages that I might need as a teacher (like Assignments, Syllabus, etc), that had pre-made charts and bulleted lists. This would be incredibly helpful if I were really setting up an educator page (especially since I've found formatting things like making charts to be occasionally tricky on this site), but I decided to do student and educator book club pages instead. In order to cut down on confusion for potential users I was easily able to delete the unnecessary pages from my navigation sidebar.
My overall impression is that PBWorks is easy enough for an educator to set up - it did take me a while to set up my pages (even though they may look simple!!), though from what I saw of Wikispaces I think it would take a while to set up a wiki on any host site. I definitely think students would find this easy and enjoyable to use - through links and the sidebar I was able to make everything neatly organized and accessible.

1 comment:

  1. Nice post. I hadn't checked out the templates - glad you mentioned them!

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