We’ve added some additional explanations to the teacher section in MapSkip’s My Passport page and we thought we should maybe also blog about the various options that are now available to teachers on this site.

For teachers there are now three strategies on how to use MapSkip in the classroom:

• Let each student create their own full MapSkip account. While this will give your students all the features of MapSkip, it will limit your ability to monitor their activity on the site.
• Create student accounts for each student on the My Passport page in the My Students section. Advantages are easier monitoring of student stories on the site and additional options for the teacher. These student accounts are tied to the teacher’s email address and also require less personal data.
• You can also use student accounts for groups of students if you are planning to have teams working on stories together. In that case a team of students can share one username and password.

We feel that this should give teachers and students a wide range of options to join MapSkip. We will work on several enhancements for the use of MapSkip in the classroom (enhanced teacher controls, cross-linking of student stories, etc.) and we are very interested to hear from teachers about their successes and challenges in bringing MapSkip to their students.