Student Emails... again.

[Geoff]

Doesn't the use of VLEs etc make pupil email essential if they are to make full use of them?

The inappropriate use of email is a classroom control issue. Should we ban the use of pencils and paper because the little darlings sometimes send written notes to each other?

Indeed, it's needed for moodle anyway. Also, the GCSE ICT syllabus we teach requires us to teach email usage along with the other office guff. So the kids need email accounts for that.

[SpuffMonkey]

I'd be interested in seeing how you've managed this? I've tried to setup similar methods.

As an alternative to logging in to student email accounts - you could consider turning on "Journalling" - so a copy of every email sent is copied to a journal account where you can look at them. We have this set up, with an automatic "delete after 30 days" rule - so that senior staff can monitor what has gone on over the last month. It takes a bit of disk space - but has the advantage that students cannot just delete emails that have been sent/received before someone sees them.

[dgsmith]

As an alternative to logging in to student email accounts - you could consider turning on "Journalling" - so a copy of every email sent is copied to a journal account where you can look at them. We have this set up, with an automatic "delete after 30 days" rule - so that senior staff can monitor what has gone on over the last month. It takes a bit of disk space - but has the advantage that students cannot just delete emails that have been sent/received before someone sees them.

This sounds like it could be useful. We have just done a web search and found a walkthrough for doing this (link), however it seems the properies in our mailbox store is disabled, hence we can't enter info.
Is this how you did it or is there an alternate way of enabling this?

[Biggles]

We run our email (staff and students) on Exchange. We allocate email accounts to students in yrs 6 to Yrs 12 (about 350 students and 50 staff).

All students are aware of school policy which allows IT staff to inspect individual student email boxes, but I would love to be able to do a couple of things:

1. Have a defined list of stop words and have the system block any emails that contain words from this list.
2. Have the system send a copy of the offending email to a designated email address.

This would enable me to track any cyberbullying and nip it in the bud and also track any students who insist on using inappropriate language.

I know that no system would be perfect, but it would be good to at least make some dent in it. Not that we have a huge problem in this area (though I don't know what I don't know at this stage).

Has anyone come across anything like this that would work nicely with Exchange?

[joe90bass]

We use Sophos Puremessage, which has a built in word list and I've added a few as well. Works well, but it doesn't take a genius to work out that using ** or other punctuation to replace letters will bypass it....
If you're running Exchange 2007 and have the anti-spam componnents installed you can do this using tranport rules. Exch mgmt console > Organization config > Hub Transport > AntiSpam

[webman]

We're considering the Pro's and Cons of adding students to our schools email.
Here are our concerns, please give feedback on how these are addressed?

1: Students use it more for talking to eachother and not the teachers.
2: Monitoring the student Emails.
3: Spam (Incoming)

1. Teachers have a (custom-made) program from which they can turn email access on and off in the current IT room - so access is controlled.

2. Implemented a "bad word" filter - so any messages containing inappropriate material are not delivered to the intended recipient, and dropped into a central mailbox for monitoring. It would be possible to have a copy of all messages sent by students to also be dropped into a specified account, but we don't need this. http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.ph...content_filter

3. We have two spam filters on the inbound route - one at our ISP, and our own. One works not so good, the other is better.

[chalkwellstu]

For those of you who want it here is the guide which I used to implement restrictions on pupils (or anyone for that matter) sending e-mails to external addresses or receiving e-mails from external addresses.

Exchange 2k3 Restrictions

I would recommend testing this prior to using it on your live networks as with anything like this!

any chance of getting a copy of the echange 2k3 restrictions process? i am at this point now myself and would welcome some guidance. this link above doesn't work i assume because its an old post.

many thanks STU

[BlueDragon]

For those of you who may be interested you can look to monitor student activity via email or any other messaging content (MSN, Facebook etc) through a product called NetModerator (see Crisp® SchoolSafe? - Home).

In a nutshell it looks at the content of the message for inappropriate behaviours such as cyberbullying, grooming, profanity, self harm, drugs, race hate etc and prioritises this for a moderator so they can simply log in and see who are the biggest offenders or those students at most risk.

It also looks at short and long term relationship behaviours so it can pick up on a short bullying conversation as well as pick up on the subtle approaches of a groomer over a longer period of time.

For schools who are looking to open up the communication options within their network it may be of interest.