Learning and Leading - August 2011

Dropbox can synchronize a TiddlyWiki database among multiple devices, including desktop computers, laptops, and mobile phones.

A teacher could provide a template for an assignment that each student can use for completion of their research. For example, a miniature database can be useful for a science notebook, especially for projects involving a taxonomy or classification system. This can involve phyla in the life sciences, chemical structures in the physical sciences, and so on. Historical events and timelines also lend themselves to a note-card structure, with one event or historical character per note card and links to related cards and/or tags to organize large groups of cards.

When students work in teams, they can import their individual note-card files into a single master file. This provides a way for students to work independently with the goal of contributing to a larger collaborative effort. If students tag the cards they create with their name, teachers can track the contributions of each student.

Tiddly Wiki is best suited for small projects involving a few hundred note cards. As a way around this limitation, users can create several linked TiddlyWiki files for a single project.

customize it in many ways. Developers wrote the application using a combination of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. Users who are familiar with HTML and CSS can customize the application’s layout, format, and colors.

Tiddly Wiki can import plug-ins that extend its capabilities. A large and active user community has developed plug-ins for this purpose. This allows students and educators who may not be familiar with HTML or CSS to customize Tiddly Wiki's functionality. There are plug-ins for “to do” lists, a customization to support creative writing, a version of Tiddly Wiki with resizable windows, a code sharing tool, extensions that support the development of slideshow presentations, and many others.

Because Tiddly Wiki does not require a web server, it also offers a good environment for introducing and teaching web technologies, such as HTML and CSS. This allows students to directly edit HTML and CSS and see the results immediately across multiple pages.

An Extensible Architecture Tiddly Wiki is fully functional in its standard download, but you can also

Sharing Projects

The combination of Tiddly Wiki plus
Dropbox is a particularly powerful
way to collaborate. Because Dropbox
creates a synchronized local copy of
the file on each device, users can ac-
cess the local copy even without an
internet connection. This can be a
significant advantage when the con-
nection is intermittent or unreliable.
It also results in increased speed of
access when the internet is available.
Once users re-connect their devices,
Dropbox synchronizes the local files.