Investigating the issue of the need for emails, I chanced upon a provider called Kidblog. As one might be able to tell from the name, this provider aims at classroom blogs for young students, elementary school students in particular. It seems (I have not yet signed up for this service, but I probably will so that I can investigate it) that student emails are not needed in order to create 'accounts' for students.
The downside seems that if many teachers are going to implement blogs at SBP (this is our hope), and each teacher 'creates' an account for the student for one particular class, the student's other teacher will likely have to 'create' yet another account for that same student. In this scenario, the [poor] student will have to remember two different dummy accounts created for the sake of by-passing the need for an email address.
This issue is avoided in Blogger. When a student initially creates his Blogger/Google account, ALL the Blogger blogs in which he participates will automatically be visible in his Dashboard. (By the way, the same is true for Wordpress; currently, I participate in/moderate three distinct blogs via that provider).
So it's good to know that Kidblogs exists, but using it creates difficulties for the students. Besides, at this point in its existence, Kidblogs only has one plain looking template. The students will reject that. And, after all, it would be a challenge to ask a student to log on to a site called sbpscience.kidblog.com, for obvious reasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment