WikiSpaces

I have a 4th grade class website this year that seems fairly popular with kids and parents. The kids really enjoy commenting on my posts and adding comments about things going on in school. Several have asked me about how they can create their own website.

So, I have a semblance of an idea, but was wondering what other people do or think about it. I signed up for an educators wikispace account. If i set it to private, and only gave the kids in my class invites, they could run their own discussion board, and even have a page that they could edit themselves. The only people who could access or view it would be themselves, and if anybody got abusive or whatever, I would know because their changes are logged under a username.

I was just thinking it would be a secure environment that they could experiment with and manage themselves. Is that naive? I don't really want to be too involved with it other than setting it up and maybe doing some lessons on it in class, because I have enough going on with teaching, the class website, and my own personal blog.

I would need to involve parents and explain it to them, but I think that given the private settings on the wiki it would not be too much of a hard sell.