Many of you have asked for a hit on this topic. The following is what I have
received:
We use the free gaggle accounts, and it's a pain. There are tons of pop-ups even
with a pop-up blocker, and every user receives tons of junk mail. I have some users
who haven't logged in for over a year, and they have 200-300 emails in their
accounts. Gaggle does have an upgraded version for a fee in which you don't have to
deal with all of this. I don't know the cost. I would not recommend it if you have
alternate means for email.
Marilyn, our school has been using it for a couple of years JUST within the
computer skills/digital communications classes. However, we are now gearing up to
take it schoolwide after Christmas break, and this librarian is both excited and
very wary (afraid I'll turn into a fulltime cop!). Please post a hit so that we
will be entering this venture with our facts straight.
I am not high school,but have used it with 5-6 grade. One definite pro is the
filtering/blocking ability, which I, as the school admin for it, was able to
customize. A con is that the free version does have ads, though none are supposed
to be inappropriate for school. The paid version is fairly inexpensive and has no
ads. Overall, I really liked the program.
I teach at a middle school, but used to teach at a high school, and I now use
gaggle.net for part of my 7th grade class.
I love it completely - It blocks inappropriate words, pictures and the teacher has
full control of the class and who they can e-mail, chat with and more. I know that
I do not use it to the extent that I could, but it is well worth it. I choose to
use the free version, but could see where it would be great if you could pay for
it, then there would be no advertisements.
I would be interested in whatever you find out as we are planning on using it in
the future here. I know a few schools in Wisconsin use it and have been happy with
it.
We started this year. No big problems so far. Space allotments need to be
tweaked--some students had major problems submitting work such as voice recordings,
power point presentations etc. to a teacher via gaggle mail.
My reading teacher has her kids use gaggle when they email authors. So far I
haven't really found any cons. The pros are that you can check who they are
receiving messages from and you can cancel it when they no longer need it.
Our kids only really need to have
email for this one assignment for a couple of weeks so it works pretty well for us.
Marilyn
Marilyn Wagner-Janssen
Library Media Specialist
Oxford High School
61 Quaker Farms Rd
Oxford, CT 06478
203 888-2468
wagnerm@oxfordpublicschools.org
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