Social Network for pupils aged 7-12 years old

[Justino]

Hi I'm Justin Soh from Anderson Primary School in Singapore,

My pupils are of the age group of 7 - 12. They are currently using ning.com as their classroom collaboration platform. However, when we have checked the terms and conditions recently and discovered that ning.com only allows a minimum age of 13 and above to use this platform.

As we have find ning.com is safe for our pupils of this age, we are very interested to continue to use ning.com for our school as a platform for collaboration.

Would ning.com be allowing children of aged 7 to 12 years to sign up if they are under supervision of teachers? If our pupils of this age group is not allowed to use ning.com, is there any other such platforms similar to ning.com for us to use?

Hope to hear a favourable reply soon. Appreciate if someone can help/assist/advice :) Thanks have a nice day.

Justino

[Jon]

I am not knowledgeable about Ning's policies, but I would hope that they would let you continue. It's probably safer for your students to be on their own Ning social network instead of Facebook or MySpace where they would be exposed to a lot of inappropriate content.

Some suggestions for your educational social network: Set it up so that it is hidden and/or private. That way, only your students will be able to participate.

Good luck!

[Nancy Bosch]

I'm not an authority on ning but if the Terms of Service says 13 then you must be 13. If anything untoward happens, bullying, rude comment, copyright infringement, pirated music or video, inappropriate photo, etc. and a parent or administrator has a concern you don't have a leg to stand on. Ning is full of nooks and crannies--I would not want to monitor it with kids under high school age. With forum, blog, messaging, groups, profiles etc--IMO, you're playing with fire. N.

[Jon]

Another option if you want to avoid the hassle and dangers of using someone else's network is to set up your own website. This is easy to do if you have the technical knowledge and resources. I don't want to get you or your students in trouble, so if there are concerns perhaps Ning isn't the answer. Perhaps if Ning knew about your project, they would be willing to make an exception?

[Nancy Bosch]

They make no exceptions. :(