Best email service

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 5, 2007 at 3:23pm

Mike, We use http://www.think.com for the elementary students in our gifted program. I've used it for 3 years and it has some pros and cons.

PROS:
Safe; students can only email other think.com users unless they add outside addresses to address book
Consistent; owned by Oracle, always up and running
Easy to set up
Contains rinky dink webpage which young children love
Could be used as a blog (but remember very closed environment)

CONS:
Very closed! You cannot access student page from WWW so cannot collaborate easily of have outside input
Have to have administrator OK before setting up account
email address is long--janes.yourschool@think com
unusual password example: 45jelly67 (hard to remember?)


Pros and cons aside---it has worked well for us. I would recommend after setting up any accounts you make a list with student name, email address, and password. It'll save you a lot of headaches later. Good Luck, N.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 5, 2007 at 4:25pm

Only K-6 students are allowed, but it is a safe environment for them. I guess if I was to use some other email like hotmail or gmail for students, I would have them all have a school project ONLY email. My AUP would allow for teacher access to passwords and the emails--mainly we just use the email addresses to sign up for other stuff.It's a big responsibility to keep kiddos safe when they are in your class.

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Permalink Reply by muleau on August 5, 2007 at 5:00pm

Anbody use gaggle by google? Looks like it might fit my needs. I teach at an alternative school so my kids really need to have a good filter.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 5, 2007 at 5:51pm

Is there a fee?

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Permalink Reply by muleau on August 5, 2007 at 7:04pm

Google offers a version that costs nothing but contains some limited "filtered" ads. I am going to investigate futher, but so far Gaggle sounds to good to be true. I think in this day in age kids should have a school specific email address.I bounced the idea around among some of my older students and they had no hesitations, most had a couple of email accounts already. The idea that a highly filtered service for just school was appealing, kind of a free spam filter. If anyone has used Gaggle please let me know your thoughts

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Permalink Reply by Colette Cassinelli on August 5, 2007 at 8:31pm

I used Gaggle.net last year with my HS Journalism students. Honestly, most of the students did not like the user interface. The ONLY advantage is that as a teacher you can administrate all of the email accounts, passwords, and (if necessary) you can access each student's inbox. The idea is great but we found the site to load slowly and the layout is not set up like any other email program so the kids were lost at first. We even paid the $5 per child to have no advertising. Several times during the year the Gaggle rep called me to check on our service and everytime I complained about the lag. They tried to tell me that it was our school system (we have a dedicated T1 line!) or try Firefox instead of IE.

This next year I am going to have the students sign up for a gmail account using the same network id and password we provide the students. It will be for Journalism class only. I will still have access to their accounts if needed but everyone will then be able to use their gmail password for google shared docs and blogger.

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on August 5, 2007 at 10:33pm

As to your music question, http://freeplaymusic.com/ has some interesting tracks that can be used royalty free if I understand it correctly.

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Permalink Reply by Alice Mercer on August 5, 2007 at 10:46pm

Music,

Here is a pretty good list: http://www.masternewmedia.org/audio_music_publishing/music-for-vide...
But it leaves off the source that I think will get the best results for you:
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php
This has samples that you can build and layer, so rip a beat, add some horns, then rap on!

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Permalink Reply by muleau on August 6, 2007 at 2:23pm

Thanks everyone, your input was great.
Mike

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Permalink Reply by AC on August 6, 2007 at 2:26pm

http://www.mahalo.com/Free_music

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