School Forum / Message Board

[gtg93]

So a primary school I support are wanting some sort of forum, or messgae board setting up that can be completely private to the school, each child and teacher have their own account, and be able to use it to communicate between classes about different topics and events that may be going on around school.

 

Has anyone ever come across something that does this, or can anyone suggest something? I'm trying to stay away from the kind of idea of setting up our own internal wordpress server.

 

I've found edmodo.com - has anyone used it? Would anyone recommend it? It looks good and a similar layout to facebook which could simplify things a little as most staff use facebook and I'm pretty sure even the students do (let's not get into that though).

[unixman_again]

https://www.phpbb.com/

[FN-GM]

Simple Machines Forum - Free & open source community software

[bennz]

both the ones above are open source, I run a few forums and find open source an issue when you provide it as a service check out -

 

Build An Awesome Community with IPS Community Suite

XenForo - Compelling Community Forum Software

vBulletin 5 Connect, The World's Leading Community Software

 

above cost money but worth it for the dedicated support channels.

[gtg93]

I was preferably looking for something more like the edmodo idea where there was no setup or in house hosting - this way the teachers can set it up, have full control over it and it's pretty easy for them to use.

 

I'll create an account with them today and trial it out myself before rolling it out. Need to be sure it's private and is going to work before rolling it out.

 

If not I'll give the others a trial - thanks

[northeast_technician]

If you are a school why not use office365, its free for education and also comes with share point. We use share point for all of our cloud storage and also has a team discussion area and diary. So Office does that lot for us along with email.

[elsiegee40]

Safe - The Certificate in Safe Social Networking. Free e-safety resources for Schools (ages 7-16)

 

Our ICT teacher is using the above

[jmak]

If you mean only accessible to authorised users (as opposed to locally stored) you could try Google sites or even Twitter. With Twitter you can restrict the page to authorised subscribers: Protected Tweets

[Marci]

each child and teacher have their own account

 

Twitter's terms state that users must be of legal contractual age in their country of residence. Primary children most definitely do not fall under "of legal contractual age".

[gtg93]

Safe - The Certificate in Safe Social Networking. Free e-safety resources for Schools (ages 7-16)

 

Our ICT teacher is using the above

 

That looks like a decent site for primary and secondary - Cheers.

 

 

If you mean only accessible to authorised users (as opposed to locally stored) you could try Google sites or even Twitter. With Twitter you can restrict the page to authorised subscribers: Protected Tweets

 

That'd work to an extent, ie no one would be able to see what they're posting and speak to them, but I don't think encouraging them to use twitter is a good idea at that age (6-11) - considering some of the content on there...