A recent discussion on the NWP Tech Liaisons listserv focused on how to get email accounts for students. There are two solutions that have varying degrees of management.

1. Gaggle.net. Gaggle has free email accounts (there are also paid versions) for teachers and their students. The free accounts have ads–somewhat like Yahoo mail, although “appropriate” for kids (by which I take it they are rarely for alcohol, pornography, or tobacco products … ). Teachers can control lots of things, including limiting the domains from which students can receive email (so they could set it up only to receive things from Google Docs, or the class blog, etc.). Email from other sources gets put in a queue for the teacher to approve before it goes to the students’ inboxes.
2. Gmail. Google’s mail service, Gmail, has a way to create “fake” email addresses that you can use to create student accounts for weblogs, wikis, and other online services (but not for Google Docs). It works like this: you add “+studentname” to your own gmail account to sign students up for blog accounts (or whatever). If my Gmail is  pkit at gmail.com (it’s not), and I wanted to add an account for a student named Greg Brady, I would use this as the email address when I signed up: pkit+gregbrady@gmail.com. Gmail would send the confirmation info to my regular Gmail address, but the blog (or whatever) would create a unique user account for Greg Brady.