Student email trends

At this point, Three Rivers School District does not offer "official" student email accounts. If it were a requirement, I would recommend using one of the free services, like Google's gmail, so that the students could retain their accounts after leaving the district. We do not block any of the online email services at this time and, so far, I have not heard of any problems.

I'm curious about this statement:

The main reasons given are a concern for student safety and worries about misuse of the accounts.

What I see with my online students who attend many different face-to-face schools in addition to taking class(es) online is that the majority do not use a school based email account and many of them are not able to access their personal email accounts (most of which are free gmail, hotmail, msn, or yahoo accounts) from within their school networks as they are blocked.  

I have used an LMS email account that is limited to only allowing emails between members of a course (student & teacher) however that does change the dynamics of an online course that expects students to be able to communicate electronically with their parents, a mentor/tutor, or a content expert via email.  Some students who are challenged by email filtering in their school use text messaging on their cell phone to send short emails(but that is probably forbidden by school rules as well).

Many teachers I know use a school email account from school as their private email accounts are often blacked at school as well.

Has anyone from OSVD been attending the State IT Directors meetings to discuss this issue as well as others?  This group does like to maintain a robust network and they watch bandwidth usage like hawks.  Many of them need to hear and see how their IT policies are restricting the educational process before they will consider making changes.  Another good topic with this group would be interoperability between OVSD and their individual Student Information Systems. 

As teachers our mission is to prepare our students to live in the world they will experience as adults. I think this email thing is something that is really catching on and we should certainly give secondary students instruction on how to use something like Gmail as safely as possible. We might as well teach them how to use a tool that they can take with them after graduation.

Younger students could probably benefit for a more closed environment and move up to the "real deal" in middle school.

Any teacher who can be replaced by a computer, should be.

We have several districts providing student email through Google now for the first time. With Gmail they also get on-line file storage, Google apps, and an easy way to turn in work without having to print it out. I think introducing students to a Web 2.0 world is a great way to prepare them for the world they'll live in after K12.

I can't imagine trying to address the OR standards for technology without teaching students to use email:

1. Demonstrate proficiency in the use of technological tools and devices.
2. Select and use technology to enhance learning and problem solving.
3. Access, organize and analyze information to make informed decisions, using one or more technologies.
4. Use technology in an ethical and legal manner and understand how technology affects society.
5. Design, prepare and present unique works using technology to communicate information and ideas.
6. Extend communication and collaboration with peers, experts and other audiences using telecommunications.

http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/edtech/standards.aspx

Gmail will also let you filter mail headed to your gmail domain through your school's spam filters (still in beta...). This gives you some control over filtering though I've heard of several schools who are doing this the other way around, using gmail's filters as they are pretty good. I can create an account for you on my demo google mail system at http://www.oregonk12.org, just send me an email at pnelson@nwresd.k12.or.us

At the recent CODIF, held in Portland this month, Eileen Lento from Intel talked about not letting K12 schools become the digital divide. We use to think that poverty would create a divide but now I'm afraid it's our own reluctance to find productive ways to use technology in schools that is to blame.

One must also put into the equation that most classrooms have one or two working computers for 30 students and that teachers are lucky if they have 30 minutes of planning time a day. That time is never without interruptions and is never enough. What other industry would ask workers to learn such a wide array of skills with so little training and resources? We have to make systemic changes in how we provide professional development and planning time for teachers before we can expect to see improved learning from efficient used of technology tools.

"I don't have time to learn how to drive a tractor. I still have 40 acres to plow with this old mule and he's so slow... I just don't have time to do anything but keep on plowing all day."

;-) Paul

While free email hosting is obviously tempting for a lot of reasons, I most agree with Greg's and Tom's concerns about providing student email within an educational environment. Issues like cyber-bullying, embedded web advertising, teaching appropriate use, time on task, and simply having the domain name aligned to a single standard (for teacher's ease of use) are reasons.

I understand that management of the accounts can be a pain if you don't already have a directory system (in that case, using third party email may be an acceptable option), but if you run a K-12 directory like we do, then porting the names/accounts into an email server can be automated and managed fairly inexpensively. In this case, the added oversight by teachers (and access by sys admins) will have a positive effect on production and deterrent affect on misbehavior. Plus, if it's district provided, then you can avoid a lot of student excuses like "my dog ate my password."

We're looking into adding email for all 6-12 students within a year or two through, most likely, an LDAP-based web mail tool managed by Multnomah ESD or, internally, using Apple's mail server, which is built into OSX.

Another comment that piqued my interest was Paul's statement:"At the recent CODIF, held in Portland this month, Eileen Lento from Intel talked about not letting K12 schools become the digital divide. We use to think that poverty would create a divide but now I'm afraid it's our own reluctance to find productive ways to use technology in schools that is to blame."

There's a good article about ed tech as a social justice issue in this month's Learning and Leading Magazine (the one with ODE's Carla Wade :-) on the cover). It reads: "to date, decisions about if, when, and how to use technology in the classroom have been viewed as personal decisions by individual teachers. However, when teachers choose not to use technology in their teaching and learning environments, students are disadvantaged. [This...] is a social justice issue."

The authors make the case that personally choosing to not use technology is no longer an acceptable choice as it disadvantages their students over the long haul.

But all too often, the choice to use tech or not is out of the teachers hands. A recent US DOE report said that 80% of teachers wished they had more instructional technology in their classrooms so that they could more effectively integrate tech into curriculum. That tells me this is a leadership issue.

Steve Beining

Gresham-Barlow SD

My experience in this discussion is that everyone has strong opinions about this. Last year I was presented with options for free email accounts for all students and teachers from both Microsoft and Google.  I discussed this with the OVSD Advisory Council, department staff and a few IT Directors who were interested at that time. Everyone got very excited, some for external email and some against external email with everything in between.  

Mostly, people are all over the place on this issue.  Everyone has good arguments for doing it every which way with various levels of restrictions and controls.  We created a Google option through the Domain they have given us in order to provide the Open Portfolio for students. 

Google is very good about helping customize their tools to meet requirements like E-Portfolios.  The Open Portfolio on OVSD is the far end of the spectrum.  Open, flexible with limited administrative control.  Intel has provided the other end of the spectrum to Oregon through the donation of the Knowledge Community Portal.  That offering is less flexible and provides maximum administrative control.  If you haven’t taken a look at it, please try it out.

The State serves a role as Provider of Choice.  The choice of how, and how much, is at the discretion of the ESDs and School Districts.  If a District or ESD chooses to use the tools we have cooperatively put in place, great.  If they choose to host their own versions of what we are doing locally because that fits their organization best, great.  We are here to assist and enable.  Our goal is to help educators and students use good online tools and content to enhance teaching and learning where it is appropriate.Since technology moves into our lives and the classroom more each day, no one model will suit everyone’s needs. 

I think what is most important is everyone’s commitment to the appropriate use of email.  That is an education process in its self.

Thanks to all of you for continuing to create quality discussions.

We seem to be talking as if we were the ones who choose whether students have email and what email provider they will use. In a few cases that may be true. But for the majority of students, they don't really care what we choose since they already have one or more email accounts, and often think that we don't really know much about the subject.

What we do get to decide is if we are going to teach students how to use email as effectively as possible and as safely as possible. We also get to decide if we are going to use this powerful method of communication in the educational process.

This is increasingly true for blogs, wikis and heaven knows what social software will come out tomorrow.

We will never be able to teach them which new button to push. But we could teach them when where and how to push those buttons to their best advantage.