Last night was one of THOSE nights, the type where you start on what you think is a simple task and many hours later, you are still trying to accomplish it.
All we wanted was an online venue where the elementary summer school students could have ongoing, asynchronous book discussions. Our school has a Blackboard CMS so it should have been no problem. However, this summer our Blackboard will undergo major changes which will take it off line during part of the summer school session.
I wasn’t heartbroken to realize that. Neither this teacher nor most of the students are experienced Blackboard users, and I find elementary children often have trouble navigating Blackboard. The forums are especially confusing since when you try to read a post, the header fills the entire screen, so children can’t see the body of the post unless they scroll down, and children always think they should save rather than submit the post. As a result, it never shows up in the forum.
My next thought was to create a private Ning. I knew of other elementary teachers who had created the student accounts using linked Gmail accounts. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts throughout the day and evening, these were failing. I could send the invitation, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the Gmail message, it would say I was ineligible no matter what the birth date was. I know plenty of other teachers who have used linked Gmail accounts to create Ning accounts, so hopefully it was just a technical problem.
(And yes, I did say “birth date”. Ning was out of compliance with COPPA since some elementary children were participating in networks. Now Ning is needing to gather birth date data so they can not allow users under the age of 13 to participate in Nings. (Steve Hardagon has some updated information and possible work arounds on his blog. However, using a Ning was becoming impractical.)
Next I tried Wetpaint, since they have great forums, but I couldn’t make the wiki private, and linked Gmail accounts didn’t work.
So I asked my PLN what to try and one tweet suggested Imbee. I hadn’t checked out that site before. It is a social networking site for children. It is an interesting site and has safe guards in place to make it a healthy environment in which kids can learn to be responsible social networkers. The site has teacher materials and encourages classroom use, but I didn’t see any way to make a private network within it, and the teacher doesn’t want everyone in there to be able to be part of the book discussions.
Finally I decided to try pbwiki. I think that was the very first wiki platform I ever used. I knew we couldn’t use actual wiki pages for the forums because only one person could edit a page at a time. However, I was pleased to see that each page now has a comments tab. I played around in there and it looks like it will work for book discussions.
I was disappointed to see that having the invite key is no longer the only thing you need to access a private pbwiki. I tried using a different browser and going directly to the wiki. A login screen appeared, but in addition to entering the invite key, I had to enter my name (so people can track my revisions) and an email address. It no longer lets you skip adding the email address.
Next, I sent an invitation using a linked Gmail account. That worked just fine as long as I entered the wiki via the link in the email. Otherwise, I need to enter an email address, name and invite key to enter. We can have children do that using the linked Gmail address, but it is a bit more putzy.
I’ll show the entire system to the teacher next week to see if it meets his needs. If it doesn’t, what suggestions do you have for a free, private venue for online book discussions, that works with linked Gmail accounts for the email addresses?
You may want to look into Google Sites since they’re now publicly accessible.
How about wikispaces? Teachers can get an ad-free version for free!
http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K
Art, I did stop by there but didn’t see a way to make them private. I’ll look again.
Jim, Thanks for the suggestion. Wikispaces was my next step. We’ve used them before by having Wikispaces set up accounts for us from CSV spreadsheets we sent them with students usernames and passwords. I didn’t go that way this time because the teacher wants to be able to create accounts on the fly. Or rather, he’d like us to create accounts, and we are trying to empower him to create the accounts by himself as needed.
Yikes. And we thought technology made things easier 😉 This sounds so frustrating!
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good solution for you, but I am definitely interested in hearing how things work out!
The thing I don’t like about wiki discussions on wikispaces is that only one line for each topic shows – so if you have a conversation that has 15 replies, you can only see the initial subject line – no drop down arrows to expand the discussion like you would have in a forum.
Ning would be so perfect if you could get it to work…
Good luck!
Bother. Just closed the window accidentally 🙁
1: What are “linked gmail accounts”? Do you mean that you have one account, that you want them all to sign up from?
If that’s the case, have you investigated those temporary email accounts that people use to sign up for forums etc.? They last about 20 minutes or so, so you can set up an account.
2: I had information at one point about a blogging platform that was designed for children. I read about it probably 2 or maybe even 3 years ago. It was designed for class use, you could easily set it up so that it’s private and/ or the teacher has to moderate all posts/ all comments etc., I can’t remember the name, though I think that it was UK based.
3: If you’re feeling brave, how about setting up either WordPress (the simple one if you want one blog for them all to contribute to, or WordPress MU if you want them all to have their own blogs. Once done, you could add the now reading plugin, which lets you discuss books & picks up the cover image from Amazon etc.
4: An alternative “brave” would be installing Elgg. That’s in some ways better, as with WordPress, you’d have to hide the site (e.g. password protect it/ put it behind the firewall) to hide it; where Elgg you can set it so that non-menbers can’t see posts. However, there isn’t an equivalent of Now Reading as far as I know.
URLs:
Now reading: http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/now-reading
Elgg:
http://elgg.org (software)
http://eduspaces.net (example of installation – though note that I think that you can’t use it with under 13s).
WordPress:
http://www.wordpress.org
I have been using pbwiki for my class website for about a year now. While they don’t have embedded forums, I created a template that my kiddos use to comment on class activities, etc. I set up a gmail account just for my students and added each one individually by typing “+[student name]” at the end when registering with them pbwiki. That way, all of the email goes to my account no one from the outside world has a way of contacting my kiddos directly. Each student gets an individual password good for any pbwiki account to which they have been invited. I hope all of that makes sense. The system worked pretty well for us last school year.