Should schools provide students e-mail accounts?

I received this e-mail from a district parent yesterday:

 I was a little concerned when I noticed our 5th grade daughter remotely accessing her school email from home.  Possibly I overlooked any information that informed us that she would have an email account.  Could you provide that information to me again.  Also could you briefly describe any threats to our home network and what is being done on the district side to keep her safe.

After verfying that was indeed a "real" parent, I responded:

We have been giving Mankato students e-mail address since about 1997. While accounts are established for them when they enroll as kindergarteners, they do not gain access until a teacher or librarian “activates” the account by giving them a password and showing them how to access the account. These e-mails are on our own internal mail sever and students access them through a web-based interface. Their e-mail username and password also give them access to their online storage space in the district.

We have given students e-mail addresses for a number of reasons:
1. E-mail is taught as an essential skill. E-mail use and safety is formally taught at 5th grade and reinforced in 8th grade in our library media curriculum. We have based our IL and Tech curriculum on the Minnesota Educational Media Organization’s  Information Literacy and Technology Standards (base on the ISTE NETS Standards) that read:
II. Technology use
Standard: The student will select and use the appropriate technology for educational and personal goals.
Use communication programs/devices such as phones, fax, email, instant messaging, video teleconference, synchronous and asynchronous communication tools.
2.      E-mail is used to communicate with teachers and peers. Students are encouraged to use e-mail to communicate for educational purposes with both their teachers and peers.
3. E-mail used to access experts. We recognize and value human experts as a vital information source for research assignments and projects. E-mail can be an effective and efficient means of contacting such experts.

We believe it is better for the school to give students e-mail accounts over which we have some control (monitoring, search of stored e-mail, ability to disable and change accounts) rather than ask students to use commercial accounts such as yahoo or gmail over which we have no control at all. This also gives us a chance to teach the safe and appropriate use of e-mail.

In terms of threats to one’s home network, there would be same risk than if your children were using a commercial e-mail account and they opened attachments that contain viruses or similar programs. We do filter at the firewall most attachments with extensions known to carry viruses (except those enabled through macros within Office documents.)

In terms of informing parents about student e-mail accounts, we could be doing a better job and I will be discussing this with our library media specialists how this happens at each building. I appreciate your bringing it to my attention.

If interested, I am looking for a parent for our district’s library/technology advisory committee and would be pleased to have you join us. We meet 4 afternoons per school year to work on policies, goal setting, and budgeting for the district.

All the very best and I hope this answers your questions. Feel free to give me a call if you’d like to discuss this further.

The irony is that very few students use their school e-mail address after about 6th grade, prefering their personal (and unregulated) accounts. 

Does our district need to revist the wisdom giving e-mail addresses to students? 

How does your school handle student e-mail accounts? Why or why don't you provide them? Has anyone used gaggle.net?  

Comments

[Christopher Harris]

"The irony is that very few students use their school e-mail address after about 6th grade, prefering their personal (and unregulated) accounts."

Not irony, success! This means you have provided the required educational scaffolding to support the students' adoption of this technology and then had the sense to let them fly free when they were ready. Too many schools don't even provide a school e-mail account, much less allow students to use commercial accounts. If a school is blocking all e-mail, then how can they teach e-mail as a tool like you are doing? I can just imagine some teacher pulling out a photocopied worksheet of a compose e-mail screenshot so students can learn to "send an e-mail" on paper!

The wisdom is right on target. As you point out, if you weren't offering e-mail they would get it anyway...without the benefit of instruction. This is just another example of the myspace problem (which is itself an extension of the classic safe sex discussion I just realized!). We can either start a conversation about myspace, thereby allowing us to facilitate coverage of topics like safety, ethics, protection and "bad things"; or we can pretend myspace doesn't exist and let the kids flounder around in dangerous waters without knowledge.

"Does our district need to revist the wisdom giving e-mail addresses to students?"
From your excellently worded response to the parent it sounds like you know the answer to this one already, Doug =)

[Jeff Utecht]

I've used gaggle.net now for 4 years with students and have found it a wonderful tool, although the ads are a bit heavy now days. Not one school I've worked out allowed elementary students to have school email accounts and I found gaggle.net to be a great alternative. I was able to give the 5th graders accounts this year, not for e-mail reasons but for a way to transfer digital documents back and forth from home to school. The 2mb of digital locker space gaggle.net gives students isn't a lot, but enough for a couple Word documents.

[Frances Jacobson Harris]

We've been not only giving out, but requiring students to have/use school-issued e-mail accounts for (egads!) ten years now. E-mail is our lifeline form of communication for transacting all kinds of school business. None of us can imagine life without it now. Along with the accounts, we teach a required computer literacy course (Doug knows all about this) that delves pretty deeply into responsible use of those accounts and other technologies. Interestingly, though, we have noticed some number of students migrating to other services over the past year or so. These tend to be the more tech-savvy students who know how to forward mail from their school account to the new one, or who are compulsive enough to check multiple accounts each day. I think the coolness of a school e-mail account pales in the face of GMail and the like.