Hostess with the Mostest

I set off to find tools to meet my demands:

1. A wiki hosting site that would be free and not require my students to have an email account in order to join and edit the page.
2. A place to host a blog that was only visible to my students, preferably also not requiring an email account to participate. Even better- a built in method to keep track of comments to make accountability and assessment easier and less time consuming!

Here is what I found:


PBWorks, which I have gotten familiar with over the past several weeks, does not require students to have an email account.I do like the looks of the page, and I am certain they are very similar in operation to wikispaces. It probably comes down to whichever system you are most comfortable working with.

Wikispaces, which I have had an account at for a long time, is an "old stand-by." They offer a free upgrade to "Plus" version if you are an educator, and that "plus" version allows the teacher to create up to 100 accounts at a time that do not need an email associated with them. To find the instructions on how to make your wikispace have the K-12 Plus Upgrade, visit this page.

Phuser.com: This first tool isn't really a blog, but it allows you to create a discussion and invite people to join without them signing up for anything, they just click on a link sent in an invitation. There is also photo uploading and file sharing, which could come in handy. Drawbacks: you can only create 5 "phuses" (discussions) with the free version, although unlimited membership is less than $20/year.

Tal.ki is a way to embed a forum style discussion in your own website. This one has me kind of excited because last year I spent a lot of time transferring the online version of my class from a cloud-hosted LMS (edu20.org) to my free Google site. I was trying to work around students trying to remember a user name and password when they were at home and needing to access class stuff. I used bit.ly to shorten my web address so that was all they needed to know and it was written down in multiple locations, as well as linked to from the school website (those of you that work with middle school kids probably understand why a user name and password was such an obstacle). *phew* ANYWAY- I have been wondering what to do this year because I like the idea of having online discussions, but am not that excited about going back to a LMS that requires user names and passwords. So this might be my work-around, except for a few things:

1. My students can use their facebook or twitter or a variety of other online ID's to sign in, but our school denies access to most of these sites, so I am not sure if that will work for them on campus.
2. Using a variety of online ID's to sign in means that I might not know who the student is so that might affect grading for participation. 
3. I want to maintain privacy of class discussion, and I think the fact that my class website is only accessible to those with the address will keep it that way, but I am not positive it will work that way.
4. Not that big of a deal, but the free version of this program only allows the user 15 recent topics. Older discussions seem to be archived, but are accessible. The more I think about this, the more it seems like it might be a good thing to archive old discussions!

If I need help, I found a video to help me embed a tal.ki into my google site!

Of course, I could choose NOT to reinvent the wheel and just use my Edmodo.com account, but the point of this post is TOOL EXPLORATION!

I also spent a bit of time looking at my old standby LMS, edu20.org. It allows the teacher to assign a discussion as homework, create the original post, send a message to all students that they need to respond to the post, and sends the teacher a message each time a post is made (optional). To grade the discussion, a page comes up with the rubric the teacher created for the discussion assignment (optional) and a list of all the students. The teacher can click on the "show" icon to see the students' post, then fill in the rubric on the spot and add comments to the student (outside of the discussion as viewed by the entire class). I think this is pretty darn slick and it makes me want to use edu20.org in my classroom again this year. It is always a hardware issue at my school so we shall see where that leaves me...