Are your students provided with email accounts? Is there a law/regulation about providing students with email account?
There are plenty of web 2.0 tools (just discovered www.aviary.com and it needs an email address to register) but the problem is that they need an email address to register.
Prairie South School Division, Saskatchewan,CA provides each registered student with an email address integrated into their network account. The system works brilliantly and offers some security because the content on the emails can be word searched. Students in my classes have been very responsible. In six years, three of my students have been caught using inappropriate language or engaged in on-line harassment. Pretty good I think. I have lost patience with divisions/districts that inch cautiously toward student email use.
My district only requires teachers to get parental permission. I designed my own form for this. On it, I made it clear to parents that I would be assigning the addresses and passwords since the email would be for class. I also wanted to them to know that they can go into the site at anytime to review assignments. What I found most interesting was that 90% of them (10th and 11th graders -- ELLs) didn't know how to create an email account!
Never fear, we will win this battle. The better portion of my students have gmail accounts or some such. We will not be able to stop them and therefore it will be back to the real issue: responsible use. By the way, how is the Abstenance Program working in all your schools? Is the official policy to not have sex keeping people safe? Too many people need to shift gears.
Since my ELLs have no experience with email (sad, but true) and even less with the internet (even sadder considering they go to school in the Silicon Valley), I need to take them by the hand with this process. I did share with them that now that they know how to create an email address, they can make one for their own use, but since I am doing a class project with them and it is their first time using email, I need access to the accounts. They were fine with it and listed my email (created for the class) as the secondary email address because they don't have any other email.
Now, the next big hurdle at the district level is allowing teachers to pull videos from YouTube to use in our classes. TeacherTube which was approved is not that inspiring.
If you want to get more info on how to use ePals SchoolMail, I'm doing some webinars. Next one is on Tuesday, March 9. Check "Events" under the "MORE" tab on Classroom 2.0 and you will find it. RSVP and I'll send you the info to connect.
SchoolMail is free. It has no embedded ads. It was designed from the start to use with K12 students.
I'm not sure where you are located, but I know here in BC, Canada my school district (Chilliwack) is running into problems because of FOIPPA (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act) which states that we can't store any student data on servers outside of Canada. This has stopped us from getting students email addresses and from them signing up for many good 2.0 sites.
Our Superintendent is currently looking in to this to see if there is a way around it as it is stopping our students from accessing many fantastic sites.
There are schools and districts around who are just ignoring these rules, but we are checking with our lawyers to make sure we are protecting ourselves.