IMPORTANT: Linking/Updating Student Email Addresses and Passwords

UPDATING/ LINKING STUDENT EMAIL ADDRESSES TO YOUR MAIL ACCOUNT

It has come to my attention that linking a student’s email address to a teacher’s email address is creating a lot of problems for teachers and students in AMDSB. When we first started using Edublogs a few years ago, we were very excited about this feature- teachers like receiving email notifications when a student submits a post or a new comment is made on his/her blog. However, having used this system for a few years now, we have noticed that it is not only somewhat complicated, but it is causing issues for many and slowing down the start up process that takes place every September.

Moving forward…

We are no longer recommending that you link student email addresses to your mail account.

Edublogs created a tool called the Reader which you can access from your blog dashboard. The Reader is the fastest way for teachers and students to quickly read and approve posts and comments, as well as leave comments across a class of students’ blogs. Information about how to use the Reader can be found here.

So instead of receiving an email notification in your inbox, we are recommending that you create a routine for yourself to check the Reader on a schedule that works for you. If your students are blogging every day, and you check the Reader each morning, you will see all of the posts and comments that need to be approved, and you can reply to the work your students have done right there- with everything organized for you in one place. Last year I wrote a post about how you might use Edublogs as an LMS (Learning Management System) by Tagging Posts for the Reader (using tags to filter student posts in the Reader) which you may find helpful.

Next Steps

Please ask students to update their email addresses by removing last year’s teacher’s information/ your information from the field in their Dashboard > Profile and in Dashboard > Settings. (For example: If a student was attached to a teacher’s email address in his profile it would look like this: leigh.cassell+johnsmit123@ed.amdsb. To update his email address simply remove your information so it now reads like this: johnsmit123@ed.amdsb.ca)

If you need help with this please ask your TRA to submit an eBase to your school’s IT trainer.

STUDENT PASSWORDS

Please do not allow your students to update/ change their passwords. The passwords that are set for students are their GAFE passwords. In order to keep the information in Maplewood up to date and relevant for others who may blog with students in future years, these passwords need to remain unchanged. We appreciate your support with this!

If you have any questions please leave a comment below or contact me by email.

If you are reading this post I would ask that you touch base with the colleagues in your school to make sure they’ve seen this as well. Emails from the AMDSB EdTech Learning Community are still being filtered into spam folders if teachers have not yet marked them accordingly. Your help to spread the word is greatly appreciated!