Gerald Lake

I have been asked on a few occasions about using email with elementary students. For the past tow years I have been using Gaggle to provide email for students. There is a free service and a paid service. In order to use mail on the iPod Touch, you have to use the paid service.

Below is a recent email I sent to a colleague about my classroom experiences using Gaggle email:

I started mainly using it as a way to transfer text from the iPod to the computer. With apps like iFiles, this is pretty much unnecessary. However, the students did use it occasionally to send file home to work on, and then back to school, but again with iFiles this could now be done with a thumb drive.

This last year I mainly used it to communicate information with the students. When I was grading work after school or in the evenings, I would often send individual students an email with comments, suggestion, etc. about their work. I also would send classroom announcements to all of the students.

The parameters and guidelines were pretty simple. It was only to be used for school-related subjects. It was not to be used for personal communication, only items related to our learning. Once in a while I would see some nonsense emails being sent, but it was easy to squash. The main one to watch and discuss with students is when an app or a website asks for an email and the students sometimes put it in without even thinking. Most of the apps are usually pretty innocent. They will ask if they want to share their score with a friend and it will email them how they did. I kind of liked this because students were challenging each other. Websites are the worst because it is just spam. I was regularly talking with the students about internet safety and how email addresses should be sacred and private.

Gaggle has some really good filters in place. It is pretty easy to block messages once you figure out their interface. I had it set up so that they only received emails from our own class (gaggle.net addresses and eusd addresses). All other emails were quarantined. I was then able to view them and decide whether to allow them through or delete them. You are also able to view all of their emails. Apple Mail can be sent up to receive all of the students' emails as well. This is a pretty good way to monitor what is happening if you are concerned. I usually would just do an occasional spot check by randomly looking at their iPod during class to see what was there. This was pretty effective for other students to see as well, that you really do check.

At the end of this year I really thought about if I would continue to use Gaggle. Between the growing number of apps that let you connect directly to the computer and edmodo, I would say the the answer is no. For what I was doing with the students at the end of this last year, I really did not see the need to pay for an email service.

One more thing, not that I am trying to dissuade you to not use their service, but it is worth a note. Gaggle's servers can be pretty flaky at times. Students would occasionally get errors when trying to get their mail for no reason. The only solution was to delete their account from the iPod and then reset it up. Then it would work - weird.

I also had issues when connecting to Gaggle with Apple Mail. It was the same thing. It could not connect to the mail server. Sometimes it would correct itself later in the day, or in the next day(s). Other times I had to delete the account and set it up again.

So we've created this stuff on our iPod, now what?