"Closed" Ning? for the classroom. How "closed" is closed?

It's been recommended to me that I start a "closed" ning site for my classroom, because our technology director refuses to open any Web 2.0 resources to students in our district, and maybe having a closed site will change that.

My question, given the attempt at classroom blogging I've already made, is how closed is a closed ning site? Last summer I prepared a classroom blog using eblogger which was blocked-unblocked-and blocked again in pretty short order. The reason for that was that in eblogger, even if your blog had all kinds of restrictions on it, the site always had that dumb "go next blog" link so students could, potentially, get to all kinds of inappropriate blogs.

So, does "closing" a ning site prevent students from leaving it to go to other random ning sites or other ning sites they may belong to that are not appropriate in the school setting?

I've tried to research this on the internet and have found surprisingly little information about it.

thx,
deb

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Permalink Reply by Deb O'Brien on June 7, 2009 at 3:23pm

Thank you, Raman. I will look for that.

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Permalink Reply by Karen on July 8, 2009 at 12:45pm

I think you are referring to the "Invite" tab? I was disappointed to not be able to remove that, but then I discovered that you can check "Approve new members before they join" under "Network Privacy" (under Manage), so students can't invite people willy-nilly -- you must approve them first. Or you can wait and then "ban" unwanted members.

I'm interested in the code to get rid of the tab altogether, though ...

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Permalink Reply by Aparna Vashisht on July 7, 2009 at 12:21pm

You can also try Parentella.com which is only for educators and parents. It is all private groups and it is closed so only parents who are supposed to be in the group will be there.

You can try a demo account here:

www.parentella.com
un: Mr. Pencil
pw: demo

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Permalink Reply by Karen on July 8, 2009 at 12:56pm

Deb, et al,

I'm very impressed with the level of control Ning offers compared to a lot of web 2.0 tools. Considering your circumstance, the tech director may object to the link inviting members to create their own Nings; unfortunately, you have to pay $24 a month to have the feature removed. (Unless someone knows if they'll remove that for educators??)

On the other hand, it is only $5 a month to have your own domain ... I hope a more techy person can clarify this, but I'm wondering if that would open your Ning in the filter, but still block other Nings. But as other people have said, you can't get from one Ning to another by clicking like you can on Blogger.