MapSkip has very consistently attracted teachers - a phenomenon that we originally had not anticipated, but which has been much welcome.

Through our conversations with individual teachers as well as with TeachersFirst we had identified several features that would help with the introduction of MapSkip in the classroom and we are now finally ready to unveil some of the changes we have in the pipeline:

Teachers can now turn their own account into a Teacher Account which comes with a number of additional bells and whistles. If you are new to MapSkip, just indicate that you are a teacher when you create your account, and if you already have an account with us, go to your Passport page and switch to “My User Information” - at the very bottom you can now indicate that you are a teacher.

Once you have activated your teacher account, your Passport page will come with an additional section called “My Students”. Here you can do a number of things:

• Create dedicated Student Accounts. These are new user accounts that require less information for controlled anonymity and - more important - that are tied to your main account. All of your student accounts use your email address, so students can be signed up without their own email addresses.
• Review and change Student Account Restrictions. You can globally control several features of  your student accounts, like if outsiders can comment on student stories and if you want to receive email notifications when one of your students creates a story.
• Review all student accounts and see all their stories at one glance.

We are looking forward to hear from our teacher community here at MapSkip about what you think of these new features. Please let us know if there are any obvious shortcomings or if you suspect a bug has crept up. The teacher account features are for you and we want to make this as much as possible a site that teachers love to introduce in class!