Want to control blog access and use

I want to restrict viewing and use of our class blog to students. I would like to have each student have an id such as 6715Billy and a password. All the blogsites I have seen require users to have email addresses, and I want to stay away from email.

thanks

Ron Smuin

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Wylie on September 16, 2009 at 10:06pm

Try www.Edmodo.com (a micro blogging tool) or sign up for wikispaces for teachers.

Jonathan

www.educationtechnologyblog.com

Permalink Reply by Ron Smuin on September 16, 2009 at 10:19pm

Thanks. I'll have a look

Permalink Reply by Anthony VonBank on September 17, 2009 at 7:09am

I agree with J. You may rethink your blog as a wiki, and then you can get mock addresses.

Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on September 17, 2009 at 6:35pm

Ron, Our blog, A Really Different Place, is 3+ years old and we have had over 90,000 unique visits! That's a heck of a lot of reading, writing and reflecting. The site was made with Drupal (open source) and is privatedly served. It can be as open or as closed as you want (IMHO too 'closed' kinds defeats the purpose) and kids do not have to have email addresses. The learning curve is higher than a ready-made solution like Edublogs, but there are no ads and it is as safe as you need it to be. Blog hosting can be as cheap as $5.00 a month and you will need to buy a domain name.

I'm sure our webmaster would help you out if you need help.

Permalink Reply by Ron Smuin on September 30, 2009 at 12:55pm

Thanks for the ideas: - I already have some wiki set up, am poking around how to use them. As usual, money is an issue, and I don't know if the district will be willing to set up servers. Will look around. I have a ning, am fiddling to learn how to use.

Permalink Reply by Amy Cobb on October 1, 2009 at 11:07am

If you use Edublogs, which is a terrific hosting site and one that I use, you can create gmail hacks for your students. You set your students up with a username and a password. All email comes to you due to the gmail hack.

Edublogs

Permalink Reply by Ron Smuin on October 14, 2009 at 6:50pm

Thanks Amy. I have bought Edublogs supporter out of my own pocket. Would like to see each student with their own blog --- it gets a bit complicated tracking everything when 25 students are posting to one blog.

Permalink Reply by Dr. Rita Oates on October 1, 2009 at 11:58am

Hi, Ron,
You can use SchoolBlogs from ePals. You would "need" email addresses so that students could sign on with a unique name and password. You can get the email also through ePals, signing up for SchoolMail. Both of these are free.
You could set the student email so that no messages would "get out" if that was your goal. (There are teacher monitoring functions in ePals. Use Level 1 to stop all communication at your desk. Then you would need to delete weekly, depending on how much students write, even knowing that you have disabled their ability to actually send/receive email.)

You an also set the ePals SchoolBlog so that only certain email addresses can have access. If you wanted your students and their parents to have access, you can determine which email addresses have access, and no one else!
Some teachers want to have a "twin blog" where your students and those in another class are the only ones who can view the postings.
Good luck with implementing your ideas!

Permalink Reply by Ron Smuin on October 14, 2009 at 6:51pm

Have set up epals accounts. am awaiting schoolblog. looks interesting.

Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on October 14, 2009 at 7:28pm

Ron, I wasn't happy with epals so today I set up gmail (for students). Since I have a website http://adifferentplace.org I was able to open up 50 email accounts with gmail--'studentname@adifferentplace.org. Pretty cool.

Permalink Reply by Ron Smuin on October 16, 2009 at 12:27am

I'll see what happens. I used the google hack to get edublogs accounts for my 25 Grade 5 students, and am having some problems there. I will use epals for my 29 Grade 4 students.

Do you have specifics re epals?

Thanks

Ron

Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on October 16, 2009 at 6:36am

Ron, I mainly need student email at this point to get authorization codes for web applications and when I tried it with epals the emails never arrived. (are outside addresses blocked?) I'm having trouble with the gmail accounts, too. For the most part I don't have a clue what I'm doing to get the thing set up through my domain name so I've sent all the gmail help to my server provider and hopefully they will figure it out. I was able to get the email address studentname@adifferentplace.org and able to set up the accounts just fine, I just can't send and recieve mail--which is a bit of a problem!!