Thank you to everyone who replied with your Gaggle.net student
email/blog/message board/locker etc. experience. Below are the responses:
Gaggle.net is not perfect, but I had very good experiences with it at my
previous position. Before this year, I was a high school English teacher.
For at least five years, I required that my Senior English students use
Gaggle email for various assignments and as needed/desired to communicate
with me and their classmates. In addition, they used their Gaggle accounts
to participate in a discussion list that I created at another site. I liked
Gaggle so much that I even taught Gaggle workshops for that district's
instructional technology department. When I taught those workshops, I
emphasized the varying levels of filtering. I taught high school students
and didn't want them to feel hampered by too little access. However, if I
had taught elementary or middle school students, I would have wanted their
experience to be more controlled. I think most high school students expect
filtering since school access to the Internet has been filtered for as long
as they can remember.
The director of instructional technology created a Student Email AUA that I
preached to them before they set up their accounts. So they knew that
privacy was not promised and that inappropriate use could get them into
trouble. Throughout the years, I had a few students get into trouble of
varying levels, and I always used those occasions as a teaching moment to
remind students of their responsibilities and the consequences of failing to
meet those responsibilities.
In addition to email, for two years, some of my students maintained
Gaggle.net blogs. While I wasn't that pleased with the way the blogs
worked, I did enjoy testing them out and helping Gaggle work out some of the
kinks. I am not teaching this year, so I am not using Gaggle, but in the
past, they were very responsive to help queries. I don't remember ever
emailing them and not receiving a reply within 48 hours.
Btw, the district was able to use E-rate money to pay for Gaggle server
space so our students didn't have to be bothered by ads when they accessed
their Gaggle accounts. However, the blogs were not ad-free. I'm not sure
why this was, but it was kind of annoying.
I would recommend Gaggle.net to any teacher wanting to incorporate email
and/or blogging into her curriculum.
It is the only email ours can access at school so they love it. I don't
like the fact that they can't send to hotmail accounts---I am new so not
sure about other blocked addresses. I am having kids send stuff to my
school account and then deleting it so they can access it in their sent mail
at home to complete their assignments. But, hey, its better than nothing!
We tried using gaggle for two years and it was a DISASTER. The biggest
problem that we had is that gaggle (three years ago at least) handled
attachments very poorly. Our students use e-mail to send assignments back
and forth from home to school and doing this with gaggle was so spotty that
there was TONS of resistance to using it. E-mail outages were frequent and
since we are on the West Coast and gaggle is someplace on the East Coast it
seemed to take a long time for technical problems to be resolved. Our
school moved our e-mail in house and we are much happier with the result.
Again, this is just my personal experience and opinion, but I did not have a
good experience with gaggle.net.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. I hope that gaggle is set up to handle
your situation much more efficiently!
We use gaggle in our school district as all other forms of email (google,
hotmail, etc.) is blocked by the district. It does have some nice features
but it does filter a lot. I am one of the admins. who will be notified if
something is blocked and there are a lot of times I can't see why a picture
or letter was blocked. In those cases I go ahead and send the letter/picture
through.
We don't have a lot of kids or staff using gaggle in classrooms and no one
uses the blogging feature. Gaggle is mostly used by staff.
We have been running Gaggle for at least 5 years. One year I ran it
specifically at my school, after that we ran it as a district purchase.
We have been allowed to set the blocked text words to suit us. The school
administrator (at least in our set up) can set the blocked text to be more
specifically high school or to even take some blocked words out.
Since our students cannot use any other email at school, mostly they use it.
The important thing is for the "administrator" to be an educator who will
look at any blocked messages with an eye to why the words are there not to
jump on each instance. Even in cases of one inappropriate word, you don't
necessarily need to jump on them. Also, we share the duties of checking
blocked messages, each interested teacher has a group of students they
monitor.
We are in our first year of using it. It seems to be going pretty well.
Our students are not allowed to use any other email at school, so if they
want to email, they have to Gaggle. Teachers are using it have students
send assignments to them. So far we aren't using the blog locker or message
board features.
Davinna Artibey
Teacher Librarian
Denver Center for International Studies
Davinna@comcast.net
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