I’m giving Elgg a try as a blogging tool for Year 6 in my school, as an alternative to our usual ‘design your website’ topic for ICT lessons.

Today was the first day I let the pupils loose on the system!

Setting things up on the server was pretty straightforward, although I seem to be missing the manual from my distribution 😉

Ours being a primary school, a little hackery has been required, to remove the public access option and user registration now that we’ve got the first cohort in place. Having just set up SSO for Moodle, e-mail and windows, it’s a shame not to be able to do the same for elgg, although I believe this is on the agenda for v 0.3. Similarly, being able to create bulk accounts would have made the focus of today’s session more content than process!

The pupils are quite excited by the prospects and potential, and love the idea that they’re testing v 0.2, alpha release code! We didn’t get much further than filling in our profiles, but they love the linking to other’s pages where there are shared interests. We’d like to hide some of the fields on the profile page, next time round though.

Next lesson is a week hence, but it’s going to be interesting to see whether any of them play with it in the meantime. Also, any way to get our hands on more templates, like the ones on this site?

http://eduspaces.net/mberry/weblog/2344.html