I’m working with a teacher that would like to take his students online for a short time. Quick. And there’s a rule in place that he cannot expose his students’ e-mails to public scrutiny, presumably because the IT folks in his area don’t want students to be left open to strangers contacting them. I’ll argue that point another day.
Most tools require a student have an e-mail to create an account for a blog. But not all. And those that do also don’t necessarily expose that e-mail to the world. If you were me, what would you recommend?
Seems like Blogger‘s an option, as is Elgg. So, too, is Moodle. For that matter, what tools actually display an e-mail right up front? Or don’t require one at all? (I know Elgg’s a candidate here, too.) Does WordPress MU require all users to have an e-mail address, or can the administrator set folks up without?
Your suggestions? #
I use interact.
http://www.interact.ac.nz/
This is open source software a bit like moodle. Very good. We host it locally but you can have it hosted for you. My class all have individual blogs and individual web pages but they don’t have individual email addresses. I use it for our class web page and it is just great. You have control at a lot of levels. For example I can decide for every page, blog, forum, whatever whether it is private, public, passworded, members only etc. Too many features to describe here really. Well worth looking into.
I think that 21publish.com doesn’t require e-mail addresses, but I just can’t remember right now.
Have all the students create gmail, yahoo mail or hotmail accounts using their first names and a unique course tag as the last name for all of them. Let’s say you’re teaching grade 10 literature this year; the course tag (and common last name) might be g10lit07.
Now these “toss off” email accounts can be set to forward all mail to the student’s regular mail so that the teacher can use those accounts to contact the students.
This preserves the functionality that comes with email and online tools and protects the student’s identities by limiting their online identity to a course and first name only.
This is similar to what I do with my classes … just a thought, hope it helps.
Cheers!
From what I’ve heard, you can also create student accounts using wikispaces. You have to trade emails with their help desk, but they’ll add in the student accounts without asking for their email.
WordPress MU doesn’t require users to have a ‘real’ email address. The admin, needs one to get the initial password, but this can be changed in the database if you’re hosting it yourself. just use something like phpmyadmin and update the password, it is using the md5 function.
IMHO, WordPress is the way to go.
Richard
Look slike you have a lot of great choices Bud.
21publish doesn’t require e-mail, like Greg said, but there are other options like a free hosted forum that doesn’t require e-mail. Forumer.com will let you creat your own forum, and let let you create the accoutns yourself, so you can just use one generic non-working e-mail.
Hello, Bud,
Given that “there’s a rule in place that he cannot expose his students’ e-mails to public scrutiny” most commercial services won’t really cut it here, as these services scrutinize a users online behavior in a far more thorough way than simply looking at an email address. Perhaps, though, I am naively assuming that the “no email” rule is an actual attempt to protect student privacy, as opposed to a checklist item to get past a specific school’s “security” policy.
I also think you need to differentiate between using an email account to sign up for a service, and having that email account exposed on the internet. In a Drupal site, a person signs up for the site, but their contact info is completely invisible to non-site members, and can even be rendered invisible to site members (and by “contact info” I’m specifically referring to their name, email, etc, and NOT their blog posts — although you can set up a Drupal site where all content is invisible to non-site-members as well).
If there is a real concern about student security and privacy, an open source application gives you the most flexibility with regards to control over your data, and with regards to who scrutinizes your students’ data.
The privacy policies of most of the commercial services mentioned in this thread explicitly allow them to share/sell user data with “commercial partners” –
Wikispaces will also setup student accounts without email and assign them to a specific wiki. They were very fast in getting it done.
Thank you all for your great input and feedback. Lots to digest here — keep those suggestions coming!
Comment on wikispaces:
I agree they are most helpful in setting up student accounts. But they also told me that I could have done it myself using the same email account (one of mine as a dummy acct) for each student and just never verifying the email account when I received the notification. When I set up another class I will probably do it this way to save aggravation. I can then email the students via the “wikimail”.
Thank you Bud, and everyone else who responded so quickly to my problem!
The district policy is that students are not to be entering any personal information when they are using a computer, and their email address is considered personal information. I think all of these suggestions would work, so now I’ll start looking into them more closely to see if I can figure out which option will work best for the web discussion I’m trying to set up.
In an email Bud mentioned the possibility of a discussion board, which would work well also. Reading this, though, I like the idea of giving each student a personal blog space that would be his/her own. There’s something added to the experience when you can control the format and design, etc. So over the weekend I’ll be taking a look at these options and make a decision. My plan is for this to be our writing assessment for the last week of school so realistically I need to get things rolling early next week.
Thanks again all, I can’t tell you how helpful you’ve been–amazing network you have going, I’ll definitely be back to explore!
I use Bloglines Blogs for my online courses. an email address is required for account creation, but it is not displayed in the blog, and the blogger can also use a pseudonym instead of their real name, conceal all personal information. Bloglines Blogs do not have comments, so we do commenting at a password protected discussion board at school, but students are not subject to random comments from Internet passers-by, so to speak. the wysiwyg editor is pretty good, and it is SUPER easy to get started. I am very happy using Bloglines Blogs for my students’ weekly writing assignments (they also publish a website, but we use school webspace to do that; my school offers no blogging services of any kind). here are my notes about Bloglines blogs for my students:
http://www.bestmoodle.net/ks/blogger/bl_account.htm
best wishes!
Laura Gibbs,
Norman Oklahoma
WordPressMU, no second choice.
http://edublogs.org/
Premium site is not priced out of range. The free blogs will suffice in the short term. User profiles can show email to public, but the blog can be closed to allow only logged in users, easy-peasy. Email is critical to comment moderation, trackbacks, in WordPress, though. Comments can be restricted to logged in users only.
Edublogs is a great model to follow for your own mu install. I tried their free blogs a year ago, now have my own wpmu instal on school domain.
The mu forums are very focused on helping new installs.
Class blogmeister doesn’t require an e-mail – http://www.classblogmeister.com That is what I use!
For my elementary students we set up accounts at think.com. It is very closed environment–actually too closed for my taste, but gives you an email that others people cannot access without being added to the students address book. I’ve also found over the years that what email address you use to get other accounts (like blogs, wikispaces, scrapblog accounts, smilebox accounts, etc) doesn’t have to be a real one so you could use johns.brownschool@think.com, for instance and know one would ever be the wiser.
P.S. We always get parent permission at the first of the year for setting up think.com accounts, emails, webpages, blogs, wikis, etc.