TeachersFirst: Gated Blogs for the Classroom

Think.com
General profile: Think.com is an ad-free space for online collaboration, not a blog tool, per se. This tool is really designed for collaborative projects inside or between schools, such as epals, sharing writing, or whatever a teacher or partner organization dreams up. There is a complete organizational system for finding and sharing “projects” with other schools. The “gatekeeper” of this community is the membership required of participating schools (free). The assumption is that timely teacher review (required or student work disappears), together with frequent netiquette reminders from the little dog character on the pages will prevent abuse. There are complete lesson plans to teach the safety/netiquette lessons within think.com. One distinguishing aspect of Think.com is the fact that they do not limit file space, so their tool provides a no-cost way to host podcasts. The public (parent) pages make this a simple tool for teachers to share homework assignments, etc in a plain vanilla but useful web page. The international audience is an attractive feature for collaboration and possible commenting on your students’ writing. Unfortunately, a the time that our reviewers explored think.com using a “try it” account, the “take the tour” link did not work, so the we could only guess the full extent of the type of projects possible. Think.com is also affiliated with ThinkQuest, the highly-successful web site contest that partners students from all over the globe to create original content and encourage ongoing participation from viewers. back
Features available:	Yes/no	What they call it, and how to find it	Reviewer comments
Password-protect entire blog	N		All Think.com members can see your pages. Parents can see only the parent pages.
Choices of blog appearance	N		Can change colors on some objects.
Customization of appearance with own graphics	N		Can upload images
Keywording/tagging	N
Teacher-managed registration options	Y
Teacher-managed posting options	Y	Teachers review student content: pictures, items that have been “flagged” and address book entries Project options include deciding whether students can edit each other’s work	No apparent review of incoming comments, discussion board posts, or “stickies” left by others. Content by any student on think.com can be flagged by any teacher from any school. Teachers MUST review every 15 days or content is deleted. There is a vacation mode you can turn on.
Teacher-managed commenting options	N	Anyone within the think.com community can leave stickies on anyone’s pages or comments on discussion boards
Teacher-approval of posts and comments	N	Only if flagged.	Only content that has been “flagged” by another teacher must be approved
Teacher-managed control over what different members can “see”	N		All think.com content is visible to all thinkcom members who are logged in.
Other capabilities	N	File upload and hosting, such as mp3 (podcast) files up to 4MB. Teacher web pages	No apparent total limit to space used. Teachers often use this tools to create web pages for homework, announcements, etc. on the “parent pages”
RSS Feeds	N
Help available	Y	Both support and help links
Other comments: Although you can use the discussion board and stickies tools to have students write and comment to each other, these pages do not look like current “blog” pages. The ability to upload files and the limited access to an education-only audience are possible assets of this tool. No student email is required to set up student accounts. back