We’re excited to announce a new tool we’re trying out this year called Google Classroom. It’s linked to our school’s Google Apps for Education account and provides our teachers with the ability to assign, review, comment on, and grade homework digitally. There are a number of teachers who are experimenting with using it as a tool this year to improve their management of submitted work, collaboration, and increase the speed with which they can return work to the students.
In order to access this tool our students need to have a mountmadonna.org email account, and so we’ve created student email accounts for each of our high school students to support this. Interested High School faculty worked together to develop a Digital Communications Guidelines document that HS families should have seen, as it both details the reason for the creation of the school email account as well as establishes a set of responsibilities that the students must agree to in order to use their school email account. The document should have been signed by the student and one of their parents. A copy is included here for your information. Parents are encouraged to review the list of responsibilities with their child(ren), especially in light of how they may augment or be different from any personal rules of use a family might already have in place regarding Digital Communication. The document is also meant to establish basic guidelines for all digital communications students engage in related to school, and so is not intended to be limited to email.
The student email accounts are set up as and students are allowed to use them for other purposes, but they are primarily intended for school use and students know that the information they share via these accounts is not private. They were given initial passwords that they reset upon their initial login. The school has basic monitoring of the accounts in place and can disable (or view the contents) of the accounts at any time if there is a legitimate reason to do so. We may also decide to change the restrictions placed on user accounts if we feel the need is warranted.
The Middle School faculty is also considering whether this tool may be valuable for some of their classes, but we know that at the Middle School level there are a number of other considerations to take into account. So we are taking a longer time to review and determine what may be appropriate for the younger students. If we do decide to set up accounts for the Middle School students, they will not likely be allowed to send or receive email to anyone outside the mountmadonna.org domain, so it will effectively be a private email network for them. Once we have worked out how we would like to proceed, additional information will be sent home to the Middle School families describing the new program.
Our intention is to utilize both the new tools and the new email accounts as additional learning environments for our school. We’ll explore and grow together as we expand the online resources our students can explore.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the Director of Technology, Nicole Tervalon at nicole.tervalon at mountmadonna.org.