Technology is taking over almost everything, including students’ daily lives.
The school started out moving the morning announcements to Facebook and Twitter instead of announcing them in the morning.
Now, the district is providing students with e-mails accounts. This is all part of an effort to make documents and projects that are worked on in school easily accessible at home.
“It’s easier to get work done from home, and I use it for school projects a lot,” junior Emily Kohlfeld said.
Before students began to use their e-mail accounts, teachers gave instructions and showed video tutorials to help students take advantage of all the tools and programs that come along with the e-mailing .
“It was easy (to set up). Mrs. Robinson showed us a Atomic Learning video that helped a lot too,” Kohlfeld said.
The district provided e-mail accounts that come with a program called Skydrive, which is an online file source that will replace the school’s “My Documents” file source, the current location where most students save their school projects. Skydrive’s maximum 25 gigabytes of storage is a substantial amount more than the “My Documents” file source, which only has less than one gigabyte of storage.
“I used it last night because I had a paper due. It’s also convenient because I can get to these files anywhere, so I can get my work done earlier,” junior Erin Flynn said.
Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point, and One Note are all free programs included with this e-mail account, and all students will have access to these programs anywhere there is an internet connection.
Another tool that students will be able to utilize is changing the e-mail settings on the account so that whenever a new e-mail is sent to their inbox, students will receive a text message notifying them of the e-mail.
“So now a teacher, coach, or club sponsor can just e-mail students and they will receive a text message to their phone, if students have this option setup and on,” Assistant Principal Randy Carter said.
Although some students find these new accounts to be very beneficial, some don’t have a need to use them.
“I’m probably not going to use it, even though it is overall a good idea,” junior Kyle Kleist said.
Written by: Kayla Calandro