As a network administrator for a PK-12 school district, I can echo what Kary said. We have major responsibilities to ensure the safety of our students, as well as protecting them from viewing/participating in inappropriate content.
Unfortunately, funding problems prevent some districts from being able to provide student email accounts (this has been one of our challenges). It seems that other projects are always deemed more important, so student email accounts get bumped far enough down the list that they cannot be funded for that year (and the cycle continues).
We have seen how students and teachers could greatly benefit from the use of blogs. Our district made the decision to block all known blogging sites because students were using them to "slam" other students to the point that they felt they could no longer attend school (or even leave their home). We unblocked the Edublogs site for a pilot program, and feel that it offers a lot of what we need.
If Kary's request could be granted, it would benefit at least our district (32,000 students), and could probably benefit many many more across the Internet.
This is already a wonderful resource, so we greatly appreciate all of the time and efforts you put into it!
Kim
This has been briefly mentioned and discussed in a post on another thread. However, I wanted to put it here in its own thread so it doesn't get lost.
I know its not easy to create, but it would be great if Edublogs would go the way of Wordpress.com and set up a feature so that teachers could register students to post/comment on her blog without having to have students create their own blogs.
I understand that there is the option of turning off the requirement that people must be registered in order to comment. But you have to realize that some school districts are still very weary of blogs and this is a requirement in their policy - that there is some security measure in place where only registered users can comment.
This protects not only the kids from outside weirdos...but it also is a stop-gap measure that allows the teacher to see who made an inappropriate post or comment, if one is made.
I attempted to go Wordpress.com to see if their new system would work for our school district but alas it won't. They require email addresses as opposed to user names to register new users. Since our students don't have email addresses, that won't work at all.
(sigh)
So James, I know you are busy. But if you could put this one in the que, a lot of us would be ever so greatful.
Thanks for all you do!!
Kary