DOE Email not enough...need Gmail

[Christian]

I have a similar dilemma as the school in the Bronx that uses Wikis in that the DOE email accounts are insufficient for our needs. I wanted to ask everyone how a school can go about incorporating Gmail accounts in lieu of DOE accounts? Is it something that the DOE has to be involved? We are trying to be a green school but if we can't hold an email for more than one day than printing emails will be the only way to archive information and documents. Wikis are fine but I am trying to avoid giving teachers yet another username and password to remember.

[Lisa Nielsen]

Hi Christian,

I've passed your question on to some smart people to help answer. In the meantime, I'd like to recommend that you don't see email and wikis as an either/or decision. I believe schools need both to be effective and green and they each serve different purposes.

I recommend you read 8 Ways To Use A School Wiki to Increase Communication, Collaboratio... to learn how a wiki can benefit your school.

I also recommend you teach the educators you work with to place a note on their phones where they keep all usernames and passwords. That way they have them with them anytime/anywhere. Innovative educators will need multiple accounts and storing them on their cells makes this easy.

Let us know how it goes.

[Antoinette Wilcken]

Christian,

I am managing a project within our technology department that would enable schools to communicate with students and parents through DOE emails and numerous value-added applications. I would love to meet with you to capture your needs and those of others that face the same challenges. Please contact me at [e-mail] to discuss. Thanks! Antoinette

[Lisa Nielsen]

Thank you for reaching out Antoinette. If there are others with the same issues, please respond here so you can all connect, and email Antoinette.

Antoinette Wilcken said:

Christian,

I am managing a project within our technology department that would enable schools to communicate with students and parents through DOE emails and numerous value-added applications. I would love to meet with you to capture your needs and those of others that face the same challenges. Please contact me at [e-mail] to discuss. Thanks! Antoinette

[Josh Wolff]

Food for thought on not having space on DOE mail: It's an incredibly annoying fact that DOE mail is often more trouble than a functioning tool for educators. An easy way of 'saving' emails, instead of printing them, is to simply forward these emails to your gmail/yahoo/whatever email address, and when you get the chance, file the email under "DOE Emails", or however you want to label it.

Easy, quick solution.

Josh.

[Christian]

I inquired about using gmail but it was a no go from our borough technology manager saying it was not supported. I feel that wikis are a good tool. We have a school website that I am trying to use as a wiki but its a little slow and it would mean navigating through a lot of layers to get to the page where teachers can access the information. Thanks for the reply.

Lisa Nielsen said:

Hi Christian,

I've passed your question on to some smart people to help answer. In the meantime, I'd like to recommend that you don't see email and wikis as an either/or decision. I believe schools need both to be effective and green and they each serve different purposes.

I recommend you read 8 Ways To Use A School Wiki to Increase Communication, Collaboratio... to learn how a wiki can benefit your school.

I also recommend you teach the educators you work with to place a note on their phones where they keep all usernames and passwords. That way they have them with them anytime/anywhere. Innovative educators will need multiple accounts and storing them on their cells makes this easy.

Let us know how it goes.

[Christian]

Ok. Thanks. I will. But if parents and students begin emailing us our storage space will run out even quicker or am I not understanding correctly.

Antoinette Wilcken said:

Christian,

I am managing a project within our technology department that would enable schools to communicate with students and parents through DOE emails and numerous value-added applications. I would love to meet with you to capture your needs and those of others that face the same challenges. Please contact me at [e-mail] to discuss. Thanks! Antoinette

[Christian]

That's what some teachers do but not all. I can't require teachers to do that. Some will and some won't which makes it difficult to communicate with staff with attachments and so on.

Josh Wolff said:

Food for thought on not having space on DOE mail: It's an incredibly annoying fact that DOE mail is often more trouble than a functioning tool for educators. An easy way of 'saving' emails, instead of printing them, is to simply forward these emails to your gmail/yahoo/whatever email address, and when you get the chance, file the email under "DOE Emails", or however you want to label it.

Easy, quick solution.

Josh.

[Christopher M. Casal]

You could budget/pay for the enterprise level Gmail (basically ditch the DoE accounts and migrate everyone over to Gmail for work. But it'll cost...).

Alternatively, we use Google Apps for a lot of collaboration, using our DoE logins.
www.google.com/a/schools.nyc.gov

It's not the same as email (and Gmail is not supported via DoE) but it's great to post documents and such. All of our teachers are up on it.

[Dana Lawit]

Hi Christian,

They have a free version of GoogleApps (gmail, docs, calendar, etc) for education -- you get up to 250 email addresses -- the catch is you have to register a domain ($10 a year) -- we found its totally worth it. You'll need at least one savvy staff member to administer to help roll it out, set up email addresses, etc. All teachers and staff at my school use it, and its really aided collaboration. It doesn't replace DOE email, as you still need that log in to access many DOE servers and certain communications.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html#utm_medium=et&a...

thanks! -Dana

[Evan ODonnell]

Google Apps for Education has been a fantastic and free tool for a lot of NYC schools. X339, X271, M250, K068 are all schools using it with teachers and students - it can really expand the communication and collaboration that goes on. We've (Teaching Matters) been helping schools with training and implementation, but if I'd be happy to talk with anyone and point them in the right direction to get started on the technical-end if you just want to take a look. It's not very complicated - www.teachingmatters.org