• Make sure the images you use have clear subject matter, even when viewed at a low resolution. You never know who will try to use your lesson from a low-resolution device such as a mobile phone.

• Save early and often. As you are building a new lesson, make regular use of the “save” and the “save and continue editing” buttons. Until you save, all your changes are only stored on your local web browser and can be lost if you experience a browser crash or network disconnection.

• Try and use natural language in your sentences rather than relying on overly simple statements like “This is X”. While perfectly appropriate in some circumstances, especially for introductory lessons, overuse of such statements can make your lessons artificial and mask underlying assumptions in the material you are presenting that need to be explained to students of the language. See for example the “Pictures keep you honest” post on the Wikiotics blog.

• Build from each other. If you see some material that might be useful in your own studies or the studies of your students, feel free to copy or link that material into your own lesson collection. All the pages here, even the ones in people’s User pages are licensed to share. Teaching language is a big enough job without having to repeat the work others are offering to share.

• Collaborate in public, but assign from your User pages. The publicly editable area of the wiki is a great place to work with other people on brainstorming or improving lessons. It is also a great place to get some additional exposure for your materials, since the public area is much more visible than any particular user page. However, if you are pointing students at lessons, or even pointing collaborators at your version of a lesson you are working on together, we suggest you take a look at the User pages area where only you can make changes to content. Your colleagues and the rest of the community can view and copy these pages as normal but you can be sure that the contents of your assignments are stable and that your contributions don’t get overwritten or confused during the collaboration process.