adding students to your social networking sites without e-mails

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on April 16, 2008 at 12:19pm

Would sort of site do you have in mind? It might be easier to answer if we knew what the software was.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kathleen on April 16, 2008 at 12:58pm

I created a site right off of this site, a ning site!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on April 16, 2008 at 7:19pm

Just a reminder. Isn't there stil a 13 age limit on this site? If you are serious about having students participate you're going to have to bite the bullet and get them email accounts. They will need them for blogs, wikis and verifications for a lot of the Web 2.0 tools. Better to come up with a school plan and do it right with parent permission and AUP. Good Luck--I only see 65 kids! N.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Becky Hart on April 19, 2008 at 10:20am

The opportunities provided by wikis, blogs, nings, etc...are the reason that our school district is purchasing email for students next year. When shown what curriculum related opportunities our students were missing, administrators understood the need for student email.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Vincent Mespoulet on April 19, 2008 at 11:08am

Hi Kathleen,

I don't understand where is your true problem... i helped my student who had no mail (just a few) to create an email account before registration. It's very easy...
Alle my students are registered on my ning School Beyond the Walls. I would be interested to exchenge some ideas with teachers like you because we find very few ning sites mixing students and teachers. In our School Beyond the Walls, the social network involve students from many countries. Why not you and your students to elaborate projects together ? it's the bast way to experiment educational uses of Nings... And now we have a strong experience about it :)

Have a good day, Kathleen
Vincent from France

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Vincent Mespoulet on April 20, 2008 at 1:57am

of course, i have parental permission and students use their own account on hotmail, gmail or others accounts... For those who had no emails, i help them with a french public postal service http://www.laposte.net

no way to wait for 10 years to begin to work :)

Have a good day,
Vincent

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sue Palmer on April 22, 2008 at 1:20pm

I totally agree but my experience as a teacher has been that the dsitricts DO NOT want to monitor the accounts! They are not interested in setting up the email for just that reason. They don't want the liability.

What I have found is that mose of my students at the high school level have them. If we cover it with a permission slip, the district is off the hook on what is going on with the email. I have set up email accounts with gmail for those students who do not have them. I have set rules that they are not to use them andI monitor those few accounts. They are used for the sites and that's it!

I agree with you totally, but cannot get any takers here!

Sue

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kathleen on April 20, 2008 at 8:32am

Thanks Vincent, I am pretty excited about the possibilities here. I love the site that you have set up. We are going to use it as an academic tool. Where we can post things like photos and have the students respond to them in a discussion format. I am not sure where we want to go with this yet. One of my colleagues found out that I can place "+1" after my e-mail address and that will give me an add on account for example... krisolvo+1@hotmail.com will register another account for me. We are going to try this for now and see where the end of the school year takes us. I am really looking forward to working with you.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by SusanTsairi on April 21, 2008 at 8:27am

If you are using Ning, there is actually no need to set up email accounts for your students as Ning does not have an email confirmation system. Basically that means that anything looking like an email address is acceptable.
Another solution is a "catchall" mail account if your school is set up for that.

http://techteachr.blogspot.com/2007/12/setting-up-dummy-student-mai...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Stu on April 22, 2008 at 4:43am

http://www.gaggle.net/

http://www.epals.com/

If you can get them unblocked, permission slips etc. Have a lesson on setting up their account and they do all the data entry.

• ▶ Reply