Guidance, Documentation, Help with Rolling out Email to Pupils for the first time

[dankingdon]

Hi All,

 

So long story short, we have never provided email for the pupils at our school for various reasons that I won't get into here. We are now ready to roll out email to all pupils and have been testing with a small few over the past half a year.

 

Just looking for any guidance, best practice, help with planning the final roll out where we go live with 1000 new pupil emails.

 

The infrastructure is more than ready but it's more from a human and child protection standpoint, educating staff etc... If anyone could share any information from a similar experience I would be very grateful.

 

Thanks in advance

[bushby]

 

im at the the same stage here so will be intrested in the replys

[timbo343]

We have just given school emails out to all students here. We rolled it out by year group/house. So one week would be year 11 - Monday would be house 1, tuesday would be house 2, wednesday would be house 3, thursday would be house 4. Then a week or a couple of weeks after, roll out to year 10 in the same format.

 

We gave them a sheet with how to get on, their email address, temporary password (mail merged from excel - all details) and activate the account along with rules as we have a closed system so to speak where students can only use their school account to email staff and not email other students (cuts down on bullying). We can then start to open up domains what need to send students emails. Keeps things in control.

 

The problem we had was trying to get staff to send emails to students school email addresses as they used to have their private email addresses. I soon turned this on its head so created a student address book on our exchange server and populated it student email addresses as contacts as the student emails are hosted by office365 with a subdomain of our domain.

 

I had to create contacts of staff on office365 for students so they could quickly email staff as students didnt know staff email addresses.

 

Its all gone very smoothly and the lower years are using their email addresses (or so i think). They keep coming in for password resets so they must be using them.

 

If you need any more info on what we did, let me know.

Edited October 24, 2013 by timbo343