Thursday, October 18, 2007

Multiple Email Account Solution

This solution came to me via Kim Cofino over at Always Learning.

Schools across the nation are adopting online tools at a very rapid pace. To get your students signed up with many of the free online tools you will need to enter a "valid" email account. Edublogs is one example that comes to mind.

Gmail to the rescue. It seems that with one Gmail account you can have many "sub-accounts" linked to it. Confusing? Go here and read Kim's outstanding explanation!

How has this fantastic feature flown under the radar?

KP

Friday, October 12, 2007

Another Blogging Tool

Here's a blog hosting site specifically for schools called 21Classes. It seems to follow a similar method as ClassBlogmeister in that the teacher establishes a site and each of his/her students has an individual blog. 21Classes provides many controls to the classroom teacher.

The blogs do appear to have RSS feeds and allow comments.
This is the description from their site:

What differentiates 21Classes from other blogs services?

Most other services mainly offer blogs for individuals. With 21Classes you can become a blog host yourself in minutes. 21Classes is specifically designed to be used by teachers as it gives teachers complete control over content and student blog entries as well as security settings for their students� accounts. The site admin panel allows central control over the whole network.

Control of student entries

Also, as a site admin you may choose to moderate every new entry posted by a student before it is being published. In case the entry is in any way inappropriate or you feel that the student should rewrite his/her entry, you may defer publication and inform the student.

It seemed like a nice blogging tool for our younger learners or for those with policies that warrant moderated blogging. So here's the catch... the free version is limited to 50 student blogs and 2mb of storage per blog. 2mb of storage? Once you upload 3 or 4 pictures you would be close to your limit.

For what it's worth... I just hadn't heard of this service before. If you are using it, I'd love to hear your feedback.

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