way before the digital age, and who have only ever had and used a school
email account.
There have been many times when I've had to set up the Gmail account for the
departing teacher, and then show him or her how to use something different
from what they'd been using for the past 10 years. Yeah, it's pretty easy
for us "young'uns" (and I'm 52, but have been involved with this stuff since
grad school), but there are still a lot of teachers out there not much older
than me whose use of email and the Internet is really peripheral to what
they do on an everyday basis, so they don't know any more than they feel
they need to. Hey, ask me how much I know about telephone service, or what
goes on under the hood of my car.
For a few really long-term teachers who recently retired, we kept their
accounts on as "friends of the school," while removing them from the
departmental mailing lists (after all, isn't one of the joys of retirement
supposed to be not having to go to any of those meetings anymore?), but on
the whole, I've found it a lot easier to just transition them over to Gmail
accounts and set up some sort of "vacation responder" to alert people who've
sent to the old address that there is a new address and the old one will be
disappearing in a few months.
Letting everyone within the current school community know of the new address
is no problem. It's when the person leaving has to try to remember to let
all of their *personal* contacts know that their address is changing that
the problem comes up. After all, who of us can remember everyone we email
to?
On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Ross Lenet <lenet@patriot.net> wrote:
> I cannot imagine a typical teacher in the independent-school community who
> either doesn't have a personal email account or the wherewithal to set one
> up. When you think about the skill set we ask for in our teachers, I would
> think it is rare that, about 13 years into the online era, a minimal set of
> Internet-related skills would not be part of that skilll set. (I say 13
> years, because one can make a case that it was 1995 when the World Wide Web
> and email really took off en masse.)
>
> I no longer have and IT-related position, but put me in the camp of those
> who believe that departing teachers should be given a short grace period but
> should then switch to their private accounts.
--
keg
========================================
Keith E Gatling
mailto:keith@gatling.us
http://www.gatling.us/keith
The fact that I'm open-minded doesn't mean that I have to agree with you.
========================================
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