Social networking with Elgg at Alton Convent
Alton Convent School have used the Elgg social networking platform to provide their Year 6 pupils with blogs, social networks, tagging, e-portfolios and personal profiles, all within a safe, monitiored 'walled garden'.
Alton Convent School is an independent school in Hampshire. The Prep School has 209 boys and girls from 2 ¾ to 11; with the senior school having 280 girls from 11 to 18. There is an overlap of staff between the two schools. Miles Berry is Head of the Prep School and also responsible for the ICT strategy in both schools. He is supported by a full time network manager, David Hicks, who has previous experience of using open source software. In addition, ICT teachers and technically literate teachers play a role in the development and delivery of the ICT strategy and have author and editor privileges on the website.
Miles had experience using Elgg from his previous post at St Ives School, Haslemere, a prep school that had pioneered blogging with primary aged pupils. His report on work there is included in 'Coming of Age, an introduction to the new world wide web', edited by Terry Freedman.
To provide a platform to introduce social network technology and particularly blogging to Year 6 and Year 7 pupils, inside the school's own 'walled garden', thus addressing e-safety issues around such technology. Also to provide a way to teach pupils about the safe, creative and collaborative use of Web 2.0 tools, and to develop further the sense of community to the year group as they began their final year of primary education.
The school has a Linux based webserver running Apache, MySQL and PHP, used to host its main website and Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. Elgg was installed by downloading the package of PHP scripts to the school's webserver and creating an empty MySQL database. Elgg's install scripts ran perfectly. User accounts were created manually inside Elgg.
The Year 6 autumn term's ICT lessons, which have a clear e-safety focus alongside the technical Web 2.0 skills being delivered, begin with the completion of 'personal profiles' that form each user's personal home page within Elgg. Pupils include a list of likes, dislikes and skills which are tags within Elgg's system, enabling them to explore connections with other pupils in the year group, adding them as 'friends' within their network.
Many of the term's lessons are spent writing blog posts relevant in response to particular themes, providing opportunities for reflection on learning both inside and outside school, accounts of school events some of which are then posted to the 
school's public website, reviews of books or video games and so on. The pupils also learn to comment on one another's posts, with a style of 'say something positive and then ask a question' being encouraged. Pupils explore a number of Elgg's other features, such as uploading an avatar from the Creative Commons licensed collection at www.stortroopers.com, recording a podcast and uploading it to Elgg, including a digital photograph in a post and storing work in their e-portfolio within Elgg.
Their Elgg accounts continue to be available to pupils after the unit of work is complete, both in school and from home, and some pupils continue to use these to blog about a number of activities.
Elgg certainly met the school's aims in providing the tools for pupils to learn about Web 2.0 and social networking in a safe way. It has done much to encourage a sense of writing for pleasure, and of writing for an audience other than just the teacher, amongst the pupils who have used it.
The main challenge is that of encouraging greater use of these tools outside the programme of lessons, and it is unclear whether a safe, monitored platform such as Elgg would ever replace the likes of Facebook for the school's older students. A certain critical mass seems necessary for the success of a social network platform, but a solution across a Local Authority or Regional Broadband Consortium might be able to achieve this for small schools unlikely to be able to sustain a sufficiently vibrant online blogging community on their own.
Whilst the school has encountered no issues of inappropriate content being posted, and Elgg does have a 'flag as inappropriate' mechanism for community moderation, in a larger setting it may be necessary to provide some additional protocols for content moderation, perhaps including automatic filtering.
A selection of quotes reveals how various Year 6 users view the site: "It is great fun being able to talk to your friends." (Millie) "Elgg is a really helpful website. I like going on it because I can learn a bit more about people by reading their profiles on Elgg. I think that it is very good." (Rebecca) "I think Elgg is a good system, to start with you can access it from home , so you do homework and post some good results on your blog. It is also a good way to find out about other pupils in the school." (Georgina) "Thank you Mr Berry for setting up Elgg. It has been really fun." (Beth)
Miles is interested in expanding Elgg's use across the curriculum, alongside the school's Moodle VLE, perhaps to include its use for 'writing journals' in Years 4 and 5, as a tool for providing safe social networking to the senior school's pupils, and as a platform for residential visit blogs or even teachers' professional development blogs.
Elgg has continued to develop since being installed at Alton Convent, and Miles is keen to update the software to the latest version to explore the addition functionality this provides within a flexible, modular architecture.
Elgg makes extensive use of Apache's rewrite engine, requiring use of .htaccess files. Miles modified Elgg's well documented php code to remove public posting from the school's Elgg system, thus limiting all access to pupils themselves. Further modifications to the code tailored profile pages to questions relevant to KS2 pupils. The latest release of Elgg includes the facility for bulk account creation and external authentication.