How can I set up my own forum? on my wiki?

  lefora.com- I saw this site mentioned by Kristine  in the how to use this forum thread.

I use Meebo. It isn't actually a forum, but it's like an instant message. I, too, would like to create a forum like place for my students as well. But to only use when I am monitoring!

I tried Lefora and it was perfect.  Just like the forum we are all using at pbworks camp.  However, it placed ads on the free version and I am worried about that.  Will try Meebo next, but I already have a chat room. Still looking for a free discussion forum.
Steve

It's very hard to find a free service that doesn't host ads -- that's the only way for many companies to make money and pay the people who provide the service for free.  Even teacher tube has ads  :)

We have installed a moodle server in our district. It has a wiki tool but we're not finding it very effective.
A great part of moodle is the forum option which allows for threaded discussion.
Our thought is to utilize moodle for setting up courses (content and discussion being the biggest focus) and linking to PBWorks wikis for collaborative projects.

I've seen several references to Meebo and I'm curious because I have several students telling me that Meebo is a site that we should block - that it has lots of inappropriate chat sites for students to get into.  Are there any safety/security/privacy settings that can be set?  Is Meebo not blocked at your schools? (I think we are pretty liberal in our access/blocking policies.)

Any thoughts or recommendations?

One other problem with most of these is the students need an email, not ok for 5th graders in my district. I need to fine one that has the ability to set up accounts like PB Works does. Any suggestions?

I have been monitoring the lefora discussion board I set up and they only have ads for dishwashing soap so far.  I think I can tell the kids to leave it alone.  I will use gaggle for my email addresses.  If you can get them,  they block alot.  I feel safe that kids cannot email bad stuff with them.  Once, they flagged a girl's email because of the word "hot"  (She was talking about the weather.)
Steve

Do you know Nicenet forum? It's free, no ads  but I'm affraid you cant embed it on the wiki.
Irina

I use NiceNet extensively with high school freshmen mainly for its simple discussion feature and for submitting some homework. I have not embedded it in a wiki, nor would I want to if I could ... things would start to get too cluttered looking and cumbersome. I would prefer to link to NiceNet from my wiki.

We have installed a moodle server in our district. It has a wiki tool but we're not finding it very effective. A great part of moodle is the forum option which allows for threaded discussion. Our thought is to utilize moodle for setting up courses (content and discussion being the biggest focus) and linking to PBWorks wikis for collaborative projects.

-maguidos

We have just gotten Moodle in our district. I experimented with the wiki, and also found it sorely lacking. But I found the threaded discussion tool to be much more robust than the NiceNet threaded discussion we're currently using. I have recommended to our Technology Director the same approach that you proposed: Use Moodle to set up courses as a place for submitting homework, posting grades, and hosting discussions, but use a proper, fully featured wiki service for the wiki. Of course, I lobbied for a district subscription to PBworks!

I'm currently at DL TBE course with one of  US Universities. We communicate through the tool FIRST CLASS. So me wiki options are available there too. It's something similar to moodle or nicenet. I did not work with moodle. Do you know FC is pay or free to install as DL tool and  as forum?

Great ideas!

 I will make use of them, especially the moodle site.
May, I am thinking of sloodle to duplicate my new training session next year.

I'm not crazy about this forum. It seems when you reply, the reply doesn't actually go under the person to whom you're replying - like in the wiki camp.

I think I might go the ning route - I like the way the replies are indented and the way you can choose to get e-mail updates to threads that you are following.

Another resource might be TappedIn, which allows you to form classrooms and also uses threaded topics. TappedIn.org is a wonderful education site!

 I agree, I tried Tappedin for online communication ( we had our own room there for online meeting), For off line  forum we used also nicenet ( linked to the site)

Hi computermooah, thanks for you feedback.

I'm from the support staff of the forums, lefora.com.  As you state, we don't have threaded replies, they are 'flat'.  When we first started lefora.com we supported both, but threaded replies became really problematic on long topics (topics with more than 100 replies for a few reasons):

• You cannot paginate a threaded reply, all responses have to be on the same page.  If it's more than 100 replies or has lots of media, it loads slowly and is not a nice user experience.
• Our 'View Marker' is a pretty nice way to highlight new posts since your last reply.  With threaded, there is no way to clearly point out what's new and what's old, and it became very confusing to members
• To read all 'new' activity on a threaded view with more than 100 replies, you have to scroll  up and down a very long page to find all the newest replies, also not the best user experience

As for the email updates of threads you are following, because we've partnered with pbworks on a single sign-on system (so you don't have to log-in twice), we don't have your email address to notify of you of replies (regular Lefora forums do).  If you are comfortable with RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of the forum or individual topics.  A service like feedburner.com can turn these feeds into emails.

Lefora also has a unique view that allows you to see all recent activity, newest first.  You can get to this page by clicking 'see more' under the recent activity widget: http://educatorforum.pbworks.com/forum/post/page1/  

Thanks for the information. I had no idea who was behind this forum, and it is good to know that there is another option.

Why isn't your name somewhere on this? Especially since you have some FAQ and help off your own site. There were enquiries on the wiki about problems logging in, etc. and it would have been handy to be able to access this information. For example, how to use a permalink.

I'm trying to figure out how you support your free forum. Is there advertising? Because some of the teachers were asking for ad free forums.

I imagine there's also personal preference that goes into the decision of which forum to choose. I happen to like threaded discussions and the way that it is organized above, I find it difficult to trace a response back to the original posting.

I do understand what you are saying about long posts, but in my experience, most discussions tend to branch off before they become too long. The reason that there are such long discussions here is because the campers are directed to post under a certain topic in order to complete their homework.

On the positive side, I like that you have the viewmark, although some forums do flag new messages. You can also upload and bookmark and share. I guess I need to play with your forum to be able to properly compare it.

I would speak to pbworks about your name being somewhere on the page, so people are aware of the option.