Kidblog- Totally protected blogging for students… for free!
This site is a God-send to teachers who want students to blog but want to protect them from giving out private information to the world. It’s also great for all you micro-managers and control freaks! The dangers of blogging are obvious, so I’m not even going to go into all that. But this free site (with phenomenal customer support) allows you to set up blogs for your students then lock down the blogs as much as you want. Check out these privacy settings:
What can students put into their blogs? Just about anything!
- text
- images (from URL or uploaded)
- video (from URL or uploaded)
- documents and other media
- HTML
HTML? That’s right! Students can embed HTML created from other Web 2.0 sites (such as Animoto, Voki, etc.). Imagine these student project possibilities:
- Go to Vocaroo and record what you already know about the War of 1812 then embed your recording in a new blog posting.
- Upload your PowerPoint to Slideboom then embed it into your blog posting. Then go watch your partner’s slideshow and make comments.
- Create an Animoto book trailer, then post it to your blog.
Want to try it for yourself? Go to http://kidblog.org/DigitalGoonies2 and log in as “blog” and the password is “goonies.” Make a post or two- I’ve set the permissions so that your posts and comments don’t need approval… that is, until it starts getting trashed and all!
This could easily become the electronic portfolio that you have needed for your students! Here are a just a few of their great features:
- Free and extremely easy to setup and use
- Student usernames only need to be unique to the class, not to all user of Kidblog
- Students don’t have to remember their exact username since they log in by selecting the username from a list
- No student email is required to register
- Can upload many different file types
- Teachers can manage all their classes in Kidblog from the control panel
- Teachers have absolute control of all postings
- Teachers can make “private” comments to student blog postings so that only the author of the posting can see it
