Email

Basics
Most everybody knows how to use email now. As a medium of communication, email can help you stay better in touch with many families, and even some of your students may find email an accomodating way to ask questions and submit assignments.

Listservs are an easy way to facilitate email communication among groups of people. **A listserv is an email address which automatically forwards email to all those who have subscribed to the listserv**. Listservs exist for any topic you can think of, and many topics you never knew existed. Listservs are also known as mailing lists, discussion lists, or other variations, but usually with "list" in the name; [|Yahoo Groups] and [|Google Groups] also function, in part, as listservs.

Though email seems like the perfect communication tool to many, you should be aware of the attitude among many young people that "email is for old people" - they may prefer the instant communication of IM, chat, cell phone voice and text, and other synchronous tools (see [|this article] from the 1/28/07 San Diego Union-Tribune).

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 * A couple of words of caution about listservs**
 * 1) **Beware of using "reply**" when responding to a message you received through a listserv. Most listservs are set up so that if you hit "reply", your response will go back out to the listserv, not just to the sender of the message to which you're replying. At minimum, you could annoy people who receive unintended emails, and at worst you may severely embarrass yourself by sending personal emails to a wide audience. To be safe, create a new message and address it to the sender of the listserv message, rather than using reply, unless you truly want your thoughts to go back to everyone on the listserv.
 * 2) Some listservs generate **a lot of traffic**. If you are unable to keep up with all the messages and don't find them very useful, don't hesitate to unsubscribe. You can end up with a lot of clutter in your inbox. Another idea, if you can't keep up but like the list nonetheless, is to set up rules in your email program so that it will automatically move messages received from a listserv into a special folder. This reduces your maintenance, keeps your inbox uncluttered, and allows you to go to the folder and catch up whenever you have the time. Another option which many listservs allow is for you to receive a "digest" version, where all of the messages from one day (or other time period) are grouped together and sent in one email message

Teacher-oriented uses
As a medium of communication, email (and/or listservs) can help you stay better in touch with many families, and even some of your students may find email an accomodating way to ask questions and submit assignments. Most schools use email as a matter of course to communicate among staff and administration. Many teachers find listservs to be a valuable and stimulating source of current information, fresh ideas, and collegial support from other teachers with similar interests.

Student-oriented uses
How could email help to create significant learning experiences? Here's a [|page of ideas] to check out. Does it get you thinking? One common idea is to set up email penpals, or "keypals". [|This website] can help you explore that idea.

Resources to learn more
Do you manage your email effectively? Check out [|this article] and decide for yourself. (If you would like more detailed suggestions, see [|this article]). And do you fully understand the [|netiquette of email]?

Subscribing to a listserv is a good way to become familiar with their behavior. Read this [|Education World article] to get a good overview of why teachers might be interested in listservs, and the basics on how they work. Read about [|listserv netiquette for teachers] to get a good understanding of the expectations of listserv participants (some of this is repeated from the email netiquette article cited above).

Resources/examples of this technology in education
A useful resource for providing filtered email for schools, free of charge, is [|gaggle.net]. If you have Internet access you can use [|Gaggle] to provide individual email addresses for all students, with more filtering and teacher oversight than email accounts through Yahoo, Hotmail, or other such free web-based email services.

A site with education-oriented listservs is found here: http://www.edwebproject.org/lists.html - but it's difficult to tell which of these are active.

When seeking out listservs for professional development, it's probably best to search through [|Yahoo Groups] and [|Google Groups], where you are likely to find some on-target, active group to join.

Research on this technology in education
One study examined, through the lens of distributed cognition theory, the emails sent between students at two schools over the course of working on a science project (building a flying object). The authors found that students mostly communicated to tell the recipient stories about what had happened. Question-answer exchanges or responses which built upon previous messages were rare.

from: van der Meij, H., and Boersma, K. (2002) //Email use in elementary school: an analysis of exchange patterns and content//. British Journal of Educational Technology 33 (2), 189–200.

See also [|Changing Instructional Practice: The Impact of Technology Integration on Students, Parents, and School Personnel] [|An examination of interactional coherence in email use in elementary school]