21st Century Tools in Education: Start with email.

Does your school give every student an email account?  Why not?  Among safety concerns and inappropriate use issues, its seems time to place individual responsibility as the key and give this powerful tool to the students.

I'm wondering if when the use of paper was introduced in schools if teachers had issues and concerns about students writing and sharing bad notes to other students.  Did they worry that students would be tempted to draw pictures while the teacher is teaching.  Tools are tools and students can decide to use them for the good of for the bad.  Let's give the tools to the students and ask, check and teach responsible use.  Like paper when we see problems with inappropriate use we take steps to warn, correct, teach and in extreme cases punish to learn.

So why should we give this tool to students?

1) Great communication tool.

2) Opens up the use of other technology tools to stedents.  They can sign up and use RSS feeds, blog, libraries and wiki's.

3) Open up collaboration tools.  Documents, forms, and spreadsheets where students can collaborate with each other promoting learning.

Most districts provide emails to staff members and have seen the power.  Let's take the next step in putting these tools in the hands of the students that need to use them to learn.

Google offers Email to educational institutions.
Schools can now keep up with technology demands without the hassle of managing hardware and software. Google Apps Education Edition is free for academic institutions - with no advertising for students, faculty, and staff - and offers a variety of applications to keep your campus connected. For more information click here.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html