Community reviews for Fanschool

This can be used with any age. This is the best free source I found where I can create a class, each student has a blog, and students can comment on each other's entries.

An amazing site that had some great settings allowing me to really control who saw what the students wrote.

Kids need to understand that this is a school blog so their language and style must be formal. Once you have that down, I liked the website. It was a slow start, and most kids didn't use it unless I gave them a topic to blog about, but it gave them some practice with blogging and typing.

Kidblog is such an easy tool for kids to use and share their thoughts about books or topics. I love that they can comment back and forth with each other.

KidBlog is a safe site for children to use as their start for blogging. The class site can only be accessed by people who have a username and password on the class site. The site is easy to use. Students can post their own work by blogging or uploading files. Blog entries can also be edited after posting. Students can respond to each other by adding comments and parents (given access) can view the blog at home. All comments have to be approved by the class site administrator. The website works much better than the iPad app.

Kidblog is a great way for kids to navigate creating an online presence apart from social media and its trolls.

This product didn't have any bells and whistles - which was fantastic! I wanted a place where my students could share their thoughts with their classmates without being bombarded by personalization options, etc. I loved that I could comment back to students without making it visible to everyone. This was especially great for when I wanted to write back correcting an answer or provide feedback. As a subscriber to many databases, I would often simply provide the direct link to the article I wanted my students to read instead of printing copies of the article for everyone. I was amazed at the increased motivation simply because it allowed them to use the computer. I also loved that I could share a guest username and password for my parents that were concerned that their second graders were blogging.

My students love using kidblog to write on a variety of topics.

Kidblog's is an incredibly simple to use, yet powerful educational blogging platform. I literally set up a classroom blog in under five minutes, including adding a couple of test student accounts. I liked how I was able to authenticate using my Google login; no new login account required. Kids are able to login with their own name, not a generated user ID. Teachers have the ability to create student accounts, but there's no requirement for doing that. Kidblog generates a secret code that students can use to add themselves to the class blog. Each student gets their own control panel and ability to customize their own blogging space, but is attached to the class blog as well. Security can be customized to make all posts private, viewable only to members of the class; or, you can make your blog publicly visible; or, you can collaborate with other classes using Kidblog. The one feature I did not see that would be desirable is a community of publicly viewable Kidblog classrooms that one could discover and interact with. That's why a rated it down in content/pedagogy. The System is based on WordPress, which was a welcome familiarity. There are a number of themes that kids can choose from. Although all WordPress functionality is not enabled, the most important features are available such as media uploading and embedding, as well as post tagging.

This is a fantastic tool for encouraging students to write for an authentic audience, and creating a community of writers. It is almost the same as wordpress, but the interface is simplified, making it easier for children to navigate. This means less time fussing, and more time writing! And although this isn't a fast-paced video game, there are a number of cool designs that students can choose from and easily change.