P.S. We always get parent permission at the first of the year for setting up think.com accounts, emails, webpages, blogs, wikis, etc.

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.

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!

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” –

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.