This page will try to explain the difference between school-issued email address and personal email, explain some our of thoughts behind the school email initiative and why we see benefits in a district-issued email addresses.
Let’s start by establishing that the school email account is not the same as a personal email account. The school account is a professional email account. Students should be treat their school accounts the same way they should treat in the future an account assigned by an employer, or by a college/university. Students are expected to still use their personal email account for personal communication with family and friends, and use their school email account for school purposes. This is exactly the same scenario students will encounter when they graduate and move to college or into the workforce. We believe is important our students understand and practice the difference between professional and personal communication over electronic means. Having a professional email account at high school will facilitate this understanding.
Unlike a personal email account, a professional email account is provided by an institution to its members with the purpose of clearly identifying the origin of an email while facilitating collaboration among its members. A professional email account bears the name of the institution issuing the email account and provides the following benefits over a personal email account:
- It provides a well-known mean for official communication. For example, we intend to send copies of notifications to the student’s official email address.
- It allows recipients of your emails to easily identify the origin of the email and associate it with the issuing institution’s name. For example, colleges/universities see emails coming from an educational domain more favorably than emails from a generic domain (gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc) because they can clearly identify where the email is coming from.
- It makes it easier for people in the same domain to communicate. For example, teachers now know the email address of their students. Students won’t need to share their personal email account with his teachers next term or year. Email communication can start on the first day of class or before.
In the particular case of the accounts we provide, there are a couple of additional benefits:
- The school email account allows access to “Google Apps for Education,” which provides online file storage and the ability to share files safely and with ease between staff and students (it is safe, because the accounts are part of the same domain; it is easy because the account addresses are well known).
- The school email account is monitored. Communication between teachers and their students become more transparent when there is an official means of communication for school-related work and that channel is open for monitoring. We discourage teachers to establish casual electronic communication with students over personal email accounts.
To learn more about the initiative of issues school email address to all students, visit the Resources page.
