Pupil accounts for blogging

Blogging within schools is becoming more popular by the second. Schools are seeing the many benefits – increased home-school communication; encouraging reluctant writers; contact with other schools both nationally and internationally – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But how is the best way to set your pupils up to blog?

Some schools just set up one user account per blog, which the teacher logs in to, and allows pupils, under supervision, to create blog posts. This works brilliantly in school, but means the children are unable to update the blog from home.

A much easier option, within WordPress, is to set up a Contributor account for pupils, which they know the log-in details for. With this account, they’re able to create posts by themselves, but the posts are not published until moderated by the teacher. Brilliant! The only problem is that with a Contributor account, they are unable to upload files into their posts – so no pretty pictures.

The good news is, there is a plugin for WordPress which allows you to edit user accounts – thereby giving Contributors (ie pupils) the right to upload images without changing any other permissions on their account.

 

HOW? (Instructions intended for site administrators)

 Download the .zip file here – save it to your PC.

Log in to your WordPress site, and under Plugins>Add New, click Upload. Find the .zip file on your PC, and click Upload.

Once the plugin has installed, you’ll need to activate it. Once this is done, under your Settings tab, click on Members Components. Within this screen, you’ll be able to activate the components of the plugin which you require. For editing the Contributor role, the only component you’ll require is Edit Roles – so check this box and then click Activate.

Once this has been done, you’ll see an option under Users called Roles.

IMPORTANT – before editing the Contributor role, you’ll need to edit your role (which is probably Administrator) to give yourself the permission to edit roles (which sounds like something you shouldn’t be able to do!) – if you don’t do this, then other users may be able to edit roles too and that could lead to some pretty messy situations!

To do this, once you’ve clicked on Roles, click on your role (probably Administrator) and you’ll see a screen with lots of check boxes. You need to check the box by edit_roles, and then click Update Role at the bottom of the screen.

Once you’ve done this, click on Roles in the Users menu again, and open the screen to edit the Contributor account. The ONLY extra box which you will need to check is upload_files. Again, once you have done this, click Update Role – and you’re done!