Blog Assignment 4

Does the educational system that you are affiliated with offer a shared storage area on the network for students or faculty? As teachers in the Wilkes-Barre Area School District, we all have access to an “H Drive,” which is a shared storage area.  Do you find this beneficial?  Up until this year, we were not allowed to save to our desktop.  I used the H drive when I wouldn’t have my jump drive with me, and had to create a document quickly.  So while it wasn’t used often, in a pinch it was great.  This year we are allowed to save to our desk top, so if I don’t have my jump with me, I just save the file to the desktop.  I don’t really use the shared storage area anymore. 

What type of Email System does your educational system implement? Our school district uses Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access connected to Microsoft Exchange.  This is what we have used since I have started with the district three years ago.  Do you use this mail system at school? I use e-mail all the time at school.  It is how faculty, staff and administrators stay in touch.  Our daily bulletin is sent via e-mail, to cut down on paper usage.  We also can send requests to the entire faculty for supplies or materials needed.  We recently switched reading groups, and teachers all over the building needed to switch reading materials to different reading levels.  Without our e-mail system, this would have been a nightmare.  I utilize our e-mail system from home, to check if something important is going on, since everyone can access e-mail from home, our principal usually will send important e-mail messages at nights or on weekends.  By checking my e-mail at home, I am able to know what is going on, without having to wait for the morning.  Teachers will also e-mail lesson plans in for a sub to a fellow teacher, if they didn’t have the plans out, or want to change something around.  Lastly, if I am working on something at home, without my jump drive, I can just email it to myself, and have access to it in the morning. 

Overall, from this chapter, the most important thing that I learned is about the AUP.  While I have examined and looked at and talked AUP’s in other classes, this part of the chapter brought to mind, just how important AUP’s are, and how bad it is, that as a district, our AUP is over 3 years old, and that we as faculty or the students are not required to sign them.  An updated AUP is something that should be pretty easy to do.  We are using the computers more and more, with each child in the elementary grades being scheduled to use the computer lab once every two weeks.  With this increased use, the AUP is something that needs to be updated and used.