During the 2011-2012 school year, my child's kindergarten class had a private website (i.e. login required) hosted for free on Shutterfly with the following features (as seen on a sample site):
a roster of students (with pictures) and their parents
a calendar of events
a place for the teacher to post news
a message board for parents
a place for parents and the teacher to upload pictures
The only real downside I saw is that when the message board feature was used, parents had to visit the website to read the complete message. Parents could elect to receive an email when new messages were posted to the board, but they were frustratingly truncated like this:
Hello! A few parents have asked me if the classroom needs anything...so I thought I would just list a few things we are running low on or out of. Do not feel obligated to donate, its just if you want :) thank you in advance! paper towels tissues cleani...
Considering that Shutterfly's Classroom Websites offering is completely free, the truncated message board emails are probably not enough to deter me from recommending Shutterfly (a separate mailing list could be set up, perhaps), but I am curious about alternatives.
So far I have looked at...
OpenScholar
Yahoo Groups
... and others have suggested I check out...
Weebly
Podio
... but I'm open to suggestions for other sites.
In the short term, a hosted solution would probably be preferable, but in the longer term my child's school might be open to hosting the software. I'd prefer a free and open source solution but at the very least, the solution needs to be affordable.