Thank you to everyone who took the time to reply! A number of options here, but
none that fit the bill exactly as we'd like. With COPA there are concerns about
the age of our students working on the project so we may end up trying to have
students build sites as wikis on our Moodle site instead.
Thank you!
dave
Original Target:
I have a team of 7th grade Civics teachers that would like to have students do some
old fashioned research on the "Founding Fathers (and Mothers)", but would like to
have students create something similar to a MySpace page for their assigned
Founder. Which founders would link to Thomas Jefferson? John Jay? Anyone know of
a "safe" social networking site (or software that we could run on our Intranet)
that we could have students use, but keep closed to people outside of the class?
Hits:
<<<<How about a Moodle site? (Like webCT or Blackboard, but free!)>>>>
<<<<What about ning.com? >>>>
<<<<You could create a blog and lock it for outsiders.>>>>
<<<<Hi Dave,
Who says they actually have to post the websites on MySpace? You can
have them create websites using anything, including Microsoft Word.
Though if you are looking at giving them an actual webs-site creation
experience you can download Mozilla Suite or use Front Page or
Dreamweaver... whatever your school district has available. If you are
a Mac platform school there is iWeb which takes all the guesswork out
of making the site and all they have to do is drop pictures and text
into already created templates.
Mozilla Suite is a free download... it is for PC's. I am attaching a
PDF file that the University of Florida created to show you how to use
it. Inside Mozilla Suite there is a composer which the students can
use to create their site... you have to have each of them create a
folder and store all of their pages in the folder that you or they can
publish to the web... do you have a district website? Do you have a
library website? Does the teacher have a classroom website? That
would be the perfect venue for posting such activities on the web.
Also, there are some sites that are very inexpensive to purchase for
the year if none of the options above are available to you. Teacher
Web costs around 30 dollars for the year. Let me Know if I can help
you more.>>>>
<<<<meanwhile - if there are no "myspace" sites for schools - perhaps you could
suggest a wiki. PB wiki and Wikispaces are sometimes available depending on how
strict your content filter is. You might be able to achieve the same result. A
blog might work as well - thought probably not as well as a wiki. Edublogs.org is
usually filter-friendly. You can also download free moodle software. Good luck on
this project. our district is very restrictive - and we have not yet been able to
make things fly.
Another idea - I wonder if gagglenet might have something? I know they have email
for schools.>>>>
<<<<I use Think.com--it's from Oracle's Education Foundation. I've been pleased.
Very safe.>>>>
<<<<To date, I'm not aware of any "safe" k-12 sites. However, Facebook is a
pretty safe bet. You can create a network just for your school and set
your member (student) profiles to private. This way everyone in your
school is self-contained; you may want to tweak privacy settings so only
students can contact one another. All apps would need be verboten. It's
not ideal, so explore first; still it's much more private than My Space.
Gaggle, which has safe e-mail for K-12, may have developed a networking
component, but it's blocked. www.gaggle.net>>>>
Dave Wee, Librarian
Harvard-Westlake Middle School
700 North Faring Road
Los Angeles, CA 90077
dwee@hw dot com
"The fact that she had a nut for a head made it hard for her mind to grasp new
ideas."
~~ Miss Hickory, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 1946 ~~
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