Create an A+ Site with WordPress.com Classrooms
WordPress is an elegant solution for education professionals looking to create a website for their class, and today we’re excited to announce the launch of WordPress.com Classrooms. Whether you need a group blog for your high school history project, or to keep your 3rd grade students’ parents up to date about the next field trip, you’ll find the solution here at WordPress.com.
WordPress.com Classrooms
Get up and running — fast
We know you’re busy educating the world’s young minds, so we’ve made the site creation process as easy as 1-2-3: Register your site, customize your theme, and start posting — that’s it! No more excuses about how the dog ate your homework website.
Connect and collaborate
We’re all about engaging discussion. Invite students to post their thoughts on your latest lecture and submit their reaction papers as comments. Or maybe you just need a place to get the word out about class happenings — turn off comments entirely and make your site an informative online newsletter. You can even share class forms and documents with parents by using the media uploader.
Collaborate in comments
Your privacy is paramount
We get it — not everything can be public, especially in education. With blog privacy and password-protected pages, you control who sees your content.
Protect your class’ privacy
Dozens of education themes
Maybe your English Grammar class needs a formal, college-ruled look — Runo Lite should do the trick. Or perhaps your kindergarten website needs a whimsical touch-up — enter our newest theme, Chalkboard:
New Theme: Chalkboard
Designed by Edward Jenkins, Chalkboard is the perfect theme for a K-12 classroom website. It looks just like its namesake, complete with bottom-resting eraser and chalk, and supports multiple widget areas, custom header, background, and more. Read more about Chalkboard on the Theme Showcase, or activate it on your blog by going to Appearance -> Themes in your Dashboard.
Whatever style you seek, we’ve got your class covered.
Beautiful, functional themes
Your lessons come alive
Add images and photo galleries to your posts with our easy-to-use multimedia interface. Quickly embed videos from services like YouTube or Vimeo. Want to make your class even more dynamic? Consider adding VideoPress and a Space Upgrade so you can upload video and audio, too.
Easily embed images, galleries, and videos
Customize your site
Sticking to your school’s brand? No problem. Set a custom header or background with your logo or colors, or use the Custom Design upgrade to change your site’s colors, fonts, and CSS. Finally, add Domain Mapping to point your existing domain to your blog.
Plentiful customization options
At the head of the class
Check out these awesome classes, educators, and schools already taking advantage of WordPress.com’s great features:
The Coop
West Des Moines Community Schools Technology
CRS 5th Grade
What are you waiting for? Get a head start and build your class website now!
WordPress.com News 
Reblogged this on Singh-wall and commented:
I have just started to use this for my media Year 10 students.
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From an educator’s perspective, your note on privacy is very important. And you’re right, not everything in the classroom can/should be open for all to see, especially kids’ photos. One has to be very careful to protect kids of all ages in all settings.
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I think that this is an awesome idea. It would be a great way to get your students involved and interacting with you.
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How is it different from the “normal” WP blog interface?
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We’re highlighting existing features that we hope will be useful to educators looking to create a classroom website, and the interface remains the same.
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I had a free WordPress.com site for my school library blog, until a teacher told me “inappropriate” images/ads were showing up on the site. Please let teachers know about the ads-free paid option or at least warn them.
My upgraded, paid service personal blog is on WordPress.com and I love it. Thank you all for a great service.
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If you see inappropriate ad content, please don’t hesitate to take a screenshot, upload it to your WP.com blog, and contact support! (For others’ reference, you can find information about the No Ads upgrade here.)
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This is great! I still need to learn a lot a lot of things about using WordPress. Any class about SEO settings?
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Thanks! WordPress.com pretty much takes care of SEO optimization for you, no need to do anything specific — aside from create meaningful content, of course. 🙂
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What is needed to transform a regular site into a “classroom” site?
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Existing users have the same great features as Classrooms users — we’ve just highlighted some of the things you might find particularly useful for a classroom website.
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Nice. Thanks!
I can use this when I give my Hipster lessons.
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Thank you! This post is a great review of the most useful WordPress features, highlighting some particularly good themes. Everything said here about a classroom blog is applicable to an opinionated political blog like mine, or a business blog, or a blog for almost any organization. Veteran bloggers like me can easily fall into a rut, relying on a few of our favorite blogging features or tricks, and forgetting about the many options we could be using. Same thing regarding themes. I don’t recommend frequently changing themes, but it’s possible to use the same, old, familiar theme year after year, and be oblivious to the many alternative themes that are now available with updated designs and functionality.
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Allow me the opportunity to ask again for a missing feature, also related to the classroom blog idea; as it is at the moment, a contributor is not allowed to upload images for her posts –this is quite a barrier to students’ work, as they are limited to only submiting text for review, asking authors or editors to upload images they need. I think contributors should be allowed to upload images –and also embed multimedia– thus be allowed to submit full posts for review.
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This looks great! Everything is already available to users, but this is a classroom package. Is there anyway to have pages with different themes through one account? I could see how this would be useful in the teaching section of my site, but I’m not sure would like to change the rest of the site theme, because I feel like I found a system that works there through one of your other thematic releases. Thanks!
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Thank you! And you can choose one theme per site. But you could create a second site with the other desired theme, then create a Custom Menu to link from the first site to the second site as though it were just another page. And of course, you can always get really specific and design individual pages with the Custom CSS/Custom Design upgrade.
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This sounds like a dream come true for one of my ideas. Cannot wait to get ready and try it!
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This is great! Formative assessment at its best.
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And… THIS is why I love WordPress. So versatile! I’m not a teacher, but if I was, I would be creating a new Classroom blog right now.
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Thanks. So, if I understand, this is only a way to use WP blogs. I have some WP blogs for my classes and students, too. Can I do something new with these features?
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Thank you. I use my blog to promote my ebook, Kakadu Dreaming, educate my readers, and keep in contact. The comments on Diary of an ebook say it all!
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Reblogged this on Cmagia and commented:
So cool!
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Reblogged this on Teaching & Learning in the Primary Classroom and commented:
Sounds like some good ideas for teaching and learning in the 21st century!
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Thanks. I will will definitely take advantage of it. There’s still a lot I need to learn.
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Hi! I’ve been using WordPress for years in my classrooms (I teach college art & design courses) and love it! I’m so glad that there’s a free resource out there which encourages student participation outside of the classroom. I’ve found the quality of student responses to have gone up since I’ve required posting on the course blog, versus handing in paper drafts of their written responses. The community that has been built via the blogs are great!
I’m actually presenting a panel at the Society for Photographic Education national conference this March entitled “Teaching Beyond the Classroom: Using Blogs to Engage Students” and the entire panel is about WordPress blogs! Thanks for this timely posting – I’ll refer to it during my presentation.
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Thank you for creating such awesome tools! I can hardly wait to use them all.
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Great themes, and I really wish I had gone into teaching. These blogs would make great learning tools. They can also help parents keep up on what’s going on in the kids’ classes, too!
-Mike
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I’ve been using WordPress for my K-12 math classes for the last 3 years. I am curious about what is new.
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Sounds like good things. I’m not sure how I would use this platform differently from the WordPress.com platform I’m using already, but tip of the cap for reaching out to educators…
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Is this also possible at a self-hosted WordPress website?
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Yes, indeed! A self-hosted site would lack certain features out-of-the-box — you’d need to use plugins or custom configuration for blog privacy and custom design/custom colors.
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This is definitely something to keep in mind for future reference!
I would love to see more ideas in the mix – Educating should be made more fun and stimulating in every way possible – and this is by far a step in the right direction!
As for now I shall keep my distance, but will definitely be monitoring the progress of these application; For anyone trying/about to try this out, It would be lovely to hear how it goes!
– Jamie-Sofia, xo.
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I have suggested that students could use a free WordPress site to take course notes. Any device they have, that they can create an email message on, can be used to “post via email” to their site. Most email programs will allow you to create one or more emails even if the device isn’t currently connected to the Internet, and then post when it is once again connected. And, if your email program saves a copy of “sent” emails, you have a backup of posted class notes, if your WP site is ever unavailable.
Embed codes could be used to “categorize” their posts for different classes. An RSS feed would show just the notes, in chronological order, for a category (in this case “a class”). They could take a picture, (if allowed) of notes on a whiteboard and include them with their typed notes (image[s] as an email attachment). And, they could “post by voice” to their site, creating either an mp3 recording (if allowed) of the lecture, or of verbal notes they might want to add. By posting their notes to a WP site, they could take advantage of the “Search” function to find items. *A “study group” might share a WP site.
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Is there a grading plugin, quiz engine or student issue form plugin?
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There is not, but we’re considering feature ideas for future releases.
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I have been using WordPress in my classroom for over a year now, and LOVE it! I have 2 sites for my AP class- a Blog site and a Class site. My students have “Author” access to my blog so that they can upload content and images- I have it set so that I approve each post and monitor for appropriateness. My class site is for resources and I use the blog page on it to post announcements and class business- (I am the only one that posts content there- but students can still make comments). They are linked so you can get from one to the other easily. I really enjoy it- and many of my students really enjoy having a role in posting class content.
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How do you allow pupils “Author” access to the blog site and set it such that their contents are moderated before posting? Is the option available as one of the features presently?
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Yes indeed! You’re looking for the “Contributor” role. You can read more about each of the types of user roles here:
https://wordpress.com/support/user-roles/
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Great! Thanks so much for your help.
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I get this from you all the time. I don’t know how to set up a blog. Any help out there?
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There sure is!
Support documentation: https://wordpress.com/support
Support forums: https://wordpress.com/forums
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First question that comes to mind: Is there a plugin for student grades? That would be so helpful!
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There is not currently a grading plugin, but we’ll be considering new feature ideas for future releases!
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I love this, I just wish I was still teaching.
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Reblogged this on Truth Page and commented:
Here’s a great idea for our teachers, if they aren’t already using it, you might like to take a look at this…
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Chalkboard… what a cute theme!
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I’ll tell my friend who is a teacher about this. Looks very good!
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I’m new to this and have a question. I want to offer an online continuing education course that has several different modules, with a post-test that must be taken to receive credits. Would this work for me?
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Reblogged this on Communication and commented:
Looks like we have a place to create or class blog.
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Reblogged this on Laura G and commented:
This is an interesting piece on how WordPress can be used by schools and classrooms, well worth a read!
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Reblogged this on dorion9 and commented:
This is definitely food for thought for teachers who can invest the time to set up a centralized class website for posting student work, responses, pictures, etc. while retaining control over postings.
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Reblogged this on The Life and Times of a Single Student Mama and commented:
I would be very interested in how such a tool can be used in the counseling/school counseling world!
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Potentially a very useful and powerful teaching aid – however, there continue to be teething problems that inhibit a more productive and creative approach that combines WordPress with other learning tools e.g. occasional inability to embed Google maps, Google Calendars, and Google Slideshows, which are all key resources. YouTube? No problem.
Recently I could not embed a public Google Slideshow, even though, in theory, Google Docs can be used as part of multimedia resources with WordPress — have reported this but no response. It’s issues like this that are limiting.
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Hi,
This is a great idea.
Are there any other verticals that WordPress.com does, other than schools/education?
I’ve heard that there are “restaurants” but I can’t find them. Where should I look for
all the verticals?
Many thanks!
-Martin
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There are indeed!
We also have verticals for:
Weddings
Restaurants
Musicians
Cities
Portfolios
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I am a college student studying to be an elementary education teacher. I think this is a great idea to keep teacher and parent relationhships fluent. Teachers can post things on here; pictures of students, reminders, or anything like that. I think this is an awesome idea for teachers to use in this in the classroom!
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This actually works very well. I am currently using a WordPress blog for a Communications class right now. When I started blogging I was horrible at it (probably still) but it has made me a better writer and blogger. Blogging is a great way to meet new friends and professionals. Reading others blogs might also teach you a little something so pay attention!
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Do you have any tool for making quizzes with automatic feedback?
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We do not, but we’re considering features like this for further versions of Classrooms!
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