Imbee for Schools, Think.com, and Moodle comparisons

18th September 2006

posted in isafety, socialnetworking, web 2.0 |

I was glad to see today that Imbee has launched a Teachers and Schools initiative to help young and older people in schools learn about safe digital social networking. Imbee is designed for kids ages 8 - 14. I am convinced EVERY school today should be addressing Internet safety and safe digital social networking issues by providing a moderated online environment for students to actively learn these skills alongside adults. It is NOT enough to just “talk the talk” of Internet safety. We must “walk the walk” together, and sites like Imbee provide a great environment for this type of experiential learning that is desperately needed in our schools. The three free environments I am aware of that permit this are:

Some differences between think.com, Imbee, and Moodle appear to be:

Signup for Imbee is by teacher rather than by school, as is the case for Think.com. Moodle is usually setup with one course per teacher.
When entering a student’s name to give them access to Imbee, the teacher is prompted to enter the parent’s email address. I am not sure if this is so the parent can have free access to their child’s work in the Imbee environment, or so they can pay for that access. (This was not clear in the descriptive PowerPoint on the site.) Neither Moodle or Think.com offer functionality related to parent email addresses currently.
Imbee appears to be setup to be used more instructionally than Think.com, but also provides the blog / photo sharing area like Think.com does.
Think.com looks to have more interactive features, letting students create polls, setup debates/discussions, etc. These are unique features to Think.com that Moodle and Imbee don’t have.
Of these three, Moodle is the only one that allows for wiki creation.
Moodle is something you need to find server space for elsewhere, Think.com and Imbee are hosted on their own respective servers and the school or teacher does not have to “host” anything.
Moodle is more setup for class digital networking environments, and less explicitly social– although it certainly could be made a bit more social, if the teacher chooses to create areas for students to socially interact as well as respond to academic questions, issues and assignments. (Churches should also consider setting up Moodle sites for safe DSN.)
Think.com lets each designated school administrator setup other teacher accounts, and those teachers can help moderate student postings. It is not clear that others besides the classroom teacher in Imbee have administrative access. In Moodle, multiple teachers can be granted administrative access.
Both Think.com and Imbee are not open environments for people on the public Internet to just go into. Moodle can be configured to either allow or disallow public access. I suspect Imbee permits parent access, since parent emails are solicited from the teacher at the time student accounts are setup.
Think.com already has a global userbase of thousands of students. Depending on how teachers and school administrators configure student access, they can either just interact with their school mates or they can also interact with other Think.com student users around the globe. I am guessing that Imbee allows students to interact with any other student in the Imbee network, but I am not sure– this was also not addressed in the introductory materials on the site. Typically Moodle sites are limited to letting students enrolled in that particular class interact.

These tools look great! Now we need to evangelize for their use in schools! For more on Think.com, refer to this past SkypeCast with Cheryl Oakes who has used it for four years with elementary students in Maine. I am going to contact the Imbee folks and see if I can setup a skypecast with one of their representatives to discuss this product, learn and share more about it.

Safe digital social networking! It’s what’s for dinner!

On this day..

Brisingr plot speculations - 2008
Ways to use a wiki - 2008
The Revenge of the Digital Immigrants - Teaching to the New Brain (Hall Davidson) - 2008
Drills for SmartBoards - 2008
Update on Typhoon Wipha - 2007
Typhoons do include a lot of rain - 2007
And I have found my battle - 2006
Skype 2.0 for Mac released - 2006
Digital ethics case studies? - 2006
eBay buys Skype, Speed of Change - 2005

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 7:18 pm and is filed under isafety, socialnetworking, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On September 19th, 2006, Tim D said:

Wesley - thanks very much for covering the launch of our Internet building blocks program. We hope the program is both useful and fun for students and teachers.

Let me also take a moment to follow up on some of the bullets above.

1) Registration can happen by a teacher or a student can register up independently and then request a connection to their teacher once registration is completed

2) A parent’s email is needed to complete the registration process for each student wanting to join his/her teachers class. While access is free for everyone we do require the parent to present a credit for authentication and security purposes. Once a parent has completed registration they can passively observe all class communications and activities. This is a great way to keep parents in the loop.

3)Imbee provides a great platform for class / Internet instruction and activities or just plain fun with blogging, messaging, photo exchange.

4) We’re working on developing more interactive features for group collaboration. That release should be out at the end of October

5) We will be looking into adding wiki creation

6) Imbee is a fully hosted secure offering. The only requirement to access and use imbee is a broadband connection.

Imbee will be adding administrative access and monitor features. Release TBD

Again thanks for covering us!

2 On September 20th, 2006, Kim C said:

Our county recently purchased a subscription to Gaggle.net to provide a safe social networking system for our kids. They will have an email account, blog, virtual locker, etc. Does this fit among the ranks of the others you mentioned?