Elgg

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on November 26, 2008 at 11:14pm

You might want to consider seeking out Jim Klein at Saugus Union School District in California, who has used Elgg to build a whole-school network. Ning has a great work/result ratio, but if you have students under 13, you can't use it.

You might want to check out http://education.ning.com for discussions on expanding Ning networks across schools, but I imagine there are ways to do it. My impression is that you'd have more control with Elgg for customization.

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Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on November 27, 2008 at 9:58am

I have been working with Elgg 1 since August. I have created a plugin that keeps the site totally private. Coupled with a few other modifications it is appropriate for a k12 environment. It is much more flexible than ning. While I am satified that I have an appropriate configuration, I am continuing development of modifications for the k12 setting.

I hope to have an implementation of this by second semester this year. I am waiting for the new web publishing policy to be implemented.

Check out my blog as I have several blog posts pertaining to elgg. I would also recommend that you check out the main elgg community. I have a K12 Elgg group there.

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Permalink Reply by Dane Conrad on November 28, 2008 at 9:32am

I went throught this same scenario last summer. I had a group of teachers and administrators going to a conference, November Learning, and we wanted to start a collaboration network for our school district's administrators and faculty. We were wanting to blog about the conference as a way to kickstart the use of the community.

I installed the older version of ELGG and got it going for our use during the conference. We used it for the conference but found that some of the functionality was not as straightforward as we would like especially for non-tech savvy users. The new version of ELGG was to be released at any moment during that time but we were up against the start of school quickly approaching. I wanted to have it in place during the first week of professional development.

Several of the teachers and myself had been exposed to ning and its capabilities during another workshop that summer. I knew ning was user-friendly and had much the same if not more offerings as ELGG. However, I was concerned about students getting access to some of the more adult-oriented nings. It didn't take me five minutes of trial before I was able to access nudity and adult-content videos. Sooooo, we worked with our web filter and adjusted it to where we could allow access to the ning site I created for our district without giving access to the adult areas of ning. Our site is http://fcsdcollaboration.ning.com. You can have a look and see how it is being used. Give me some feedback about how you think it might be improved if you see anything.

It's use really took off at the beginning of the school year and now there are teachers in our district using it as a teaching tool and not just for intra-district community building.

Best of luck,
Dane

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Permalink Reply by Tim Hawes on November 28, 2008 at 1:53pm

I've been running a community on Elgg for a couple of years now (http://www.commun-IT.org) and have been very happy with it. Lots of flexibility, but at a price (I enjoy "geekiing out" now and then with a case of Red Bull and a text editor to write some code...).

Ning is great if you can live with what they have and how it looks, but Elgg will give you the most flexibility if you have the time and resources to build it.

(note: the "under 13 yr old" clause in the Elgg user statement is just based on a UK law (Elgg comes out of a UK company). You are free to implement with any user/any age within your local legal issues around minors consent)

./tim

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Permalink Reply by Sara Best on December 2, 2008 at 2:41am

Thanks for all the suggestions on where to find resources. I started using Elgg this week with my students and so far they are loving it. They have each created a blog and I am hoping to find a way that they can share their posts with each other in a group without the posts having to be public to everyone else on our network. As they use it, we are learning the tools and plugins that work and those that are bit glitchy. Working my tech coordinator to make it as user-friendly as possible. I welcome any and all suggestions on what is working well in your classroom settings.

Anyone know how to add more than one recipient to an email within Elgg? The pull down menus seem to only allow one recipient. Is there a way to change that?

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