Earlier this week I presented Lefora as a free alternative to Ning for creating your own social network. Lefora allows anyone to create a free message board forum complete with social networking profiles. Yesterday, the folks behind Lefora launched Tal.ki. Tal.ki allows you to create a discussion forum and embed it into your blog or website in seconds.

To add a discussion forum to your blog or website simply go to Tal.ki, copy the embed code and paste it into the code of your blog or website. You do not have to create an account to use Tal.ki nor do visitors to your embedded forum have to create a Tal.ki account. Users of Tal.ki login using their Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Twitter accounts.

Applications for Education
Tal.ki provides a great way to add a discussion forum to your classroom blog or website. Use Tal.ki to provide your students with a place to ask you questions. Or use Tal.ki as a place for students to ask each other homework help questions, essentially turning your forum into a student-run homework help center.

If you’re using Blogger to host your classroom blog, the easiest way to embed a forum is to add a new page and embed the Tal.ki code into that page. That way your forum stands alone as an element of your blog.