Access to External E-Mail

[pwds]

Do you all students to access external e-mail from within your school site? Please could you state your reasons either way.

 

I'm going to research what Becta says but I'd appreciate any best practice from other schools.

 

If you do allow external e-mail, how do you deal with issues of eBullying and child protection?

[ICT_GUY]

There are applications that will scan all text on screen for signs of bullying.

 

We do not allow our kids to use email, and they are not allowed unsupervised access to the computer suites.

 

We are a primary.

[webman]

We've had our own internal email service for about 6 years now, which can easily be monitored by us; and since 2008 we have had a bad word filter when we upgraded to Zimbra.

 

We do not allow staff or students access to any third-party email services. This was our own policy even before the LEA stipulated only one email service was permitted per-school. It's all standardised, it's monitored, includes anti-virus scanning and the school is in complete control. There are no reasons to allow third-party services. But we are an 11-16 secondary.

[Tyiell]

We do not allow staff or students access to any third-party email services. This was our own policy even before the LEA stipulated only one email service was permitted per-school. It's all standardised, it's monitored, includes anti-virus scanning and the school is in complete control. There are no reasons to allow third-party services. But we are an 11-16 secondary.

 

Ditto. By far the best solution from our perspective. We are currently looking at an opensource alternative to Zimbra that will filter bad words as well as spam, but for the moment we rely on Exchanges slightly inconsistent email filters:)

[rh91uk]

We don't allow access here due to the fact that we run an internal based email system - there is no need....

[meastaugh1]

As a result of policy review (e-safety/AUP) we started blocking 3rd party e-mail services to students this week. The reason for doing this was primarily the reasons mentioned in the initial post.

 

We continue to allow staff to access other e-mail services.

 

The school e-mail system is Exchange 2003 hosted in-house for students/staff with external access via OWA.

[Stuart_C]

We have our ouwn mail system (MDaemon) and block all access to external E-mail for students. This is school plolicy and related to our duty of care over the student. We can't monitor what goes on so... No one has external access. yet

 

Our system use an automatic monitoring system to flag up offensive words to me. I then forward them E-mail on if necessary.

 

Staff can use external E-mails though.

[stinkfoot]

As with Webman we have our own internal email system that is monitored. The kids have no access to external email systems or social networking sites. All internet access and IT use generally is closely monitored. We also recommend teachers do not use external email services in schools (this is a Becta recommendation), and all school business is carried out using the school's email system. I recently had to insist the Deputy, who is also the Safeguarding officer for the school, stopped using his Yahoo account for school business, he really couldn't understand the implications for not only him but also the school of using a public email system!