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.

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.

As an educational enterprise, we should be doing everything we can to provide the tools and develop the skills the students will need for careers and for life long learning. Today, email communication is just one of those skills, but an important one.

ODE/Oregon Virtual School District hosting the email service makes sense to smaller districts with insufficient technology staff. Smaller districts should be able to concentrate on helping the teachers at their desktops and dealing with the PC to tech  ratio.

 

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

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Open Source in Education Project Site

The goal of the project is to collect and expose the thoughts of practical innovators in education who can provide insights on the impact of OSS in a forum that allows for some commenting and discussion. From WikiEducator.

Here is an interview with Ruth Sabean, Director, Educational Technology, UCLA, that provides the background to UCLA's decision process to provide the Moodle software to its faculty and students. I liked the idea that they are still committed to the Sakai project and are working towards interoperability between Sakai, Moodle and other solutions. The article provides a link to UCLA's Office of Information Technology's announcement concerning the Common Collaboration and Learning Environment Initiative.

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Those who haven't yet, should take some time to explore Google For Educators. This is a great program that appears to be improving as they get feedback from users as you can see from this recent blog posting on Google:

By Molly Graham

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I just read a great blog post about allowing the students to meta-tag the books in their libraries. I think this is a great idea! Why not add selected student book reports tied to the OPAC? And ratings? And moderated comments? Why not allow the librarians, teachers and maybe even the parents to rate the books? I am thinking of something like imdb.com for the school library.

We'll add it as soon as Google releases it to us. :-)

The Google Apps for Education tools we've been using are a subset of the full Google suite. Not all the features are available yet. For example, the Page Creator tool is available but only to the site admin to create site-wide pages - it is not yet available to regular users on the hosted OVSD domain. There are a few other features that aren't available yet like the "discuss" features in Google Docs. Hopefully Google will be opening them up to us soon.

Helen Barret, a leading voice on e-Portfolios, describes her recent experience using GoogleDocs for her online portfolio. She also includes a "How To" page.

I think it would help to add Google's "Page Creator" tool for publishing the portfolio.

Helen Barret, a leading voice on e-Portfolios, describes her recent experience using GoogleDocs for her online portfolio. She also includes a "How To" page.

I think it would help to add Google's "Page Creator" tool for publishing the portfolio.

Special thanks to Google for helping the OSU Open Source Lab expand the Google ORVSD.ORG domain to create Open Portfolios for Students and teachers.

Google gave OVSD some special permissions to intergrate Google tools into our domain and create the new Google powered E-Portfolio.  The first generation of the Open Portfolio is up and ready for use.  Contact Greg Lund-Chaix using the administrator link to request an Open Portfolio.

One model of virtual education is strictly an online experience. I think that virtual education could create a bigger impact when it is used in combination with the traditional classroom model.

A virtual learning environment provides great tools for a teacher or counselor to be able to communicate and interact with students and parents more efficiently. Increasing the communication power of good teachers and counselors will improve each student’s education and college and career planning.

Simply providing tools and content is not enough, most of the current teaching staff will need training to use the new tools. Now that course content and the tools are available at Oregon’s Virtual School District, the next question is what plans are being proposed to provide staff development opportunities to Oregon’s teachers so that they can learn the skills they will need to use this environment?

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According to David Wiley, "... the Utah Legislature has provided $200,000 to Utah State University for OpenCourseWare-related activities in the 2007-2008 budget year. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first state or federal funding to be set aside anywhere in the US for opencourseware-like initiatives, and only the second governmental funding so allocated world-wide." http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/311

Hopefully, this is a trend that all of the states will get involved in.

Please let me know your reactions:

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While I do not primarily use MS Live Mail, I am using it to keep on top of the Microsoft world as I explore many others (like Google and Edubuntu). This was an interesting little tidbit on my MS Live mail today:

"Now you can easily share your stories and stay connected by publishing your Windows Live™. Spaces blog entries right from Windows Live Mail. Get started by going to Options from your space, and selecting e-mail publishing. Enter up to three e-mail addresses and either save entries in draft form or publish immediately. Then create a new e-mail with the name of the blog entry in the subject field and the content in the message area. Send the e-mail, and you're good to go!"