Communication Tools: Thing #7

1. E-mail has certainly transformed the lives of everyone in education. What has taken longer is for people to learn how to manage the huge amount of e-mail they receive. Earlier this school year our tech support specialist presented a workshop for teachers on tips and tricks for creating folders in which to file mail, setting up filters to automatically handle certain mail, and more. I've learned to clean out my inbox OFTEN so that the list of messages stays below 100 (and ideally below 50) so that important messages don't get "lost" far down in the list and then forgotten.

2. In my school the value of IM has primarily been for on-the-spot answers to tech questions, even when the experts might be sitting in a meeting or busy with a computer task that would prevent them from answering the telephone or checking their e-mail. Several emergency situations have been dealt with in a timely way this past school year thanks to being able to instantly get a message to--and a response from--the person who needed to know about the situation in order to quickly fix it.

3. I have not made the leap to text-messaging yet on my cell phone, and I"m amazed at how quickly our students can create text messages. Even entering contacts into my phone is a task I find cumbersome, since my fingers don't seem to cooperate very well working with those tiny buttons on the front of the phone. Learning the shorthand codes for common words seems to be one of the critical helps. What is that new vocabulary doing to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure among our students?? It's scary to think about that! Nonetheless, young people today are certainly COMMUNICATING today more than ever, and more than we ever thought would be possible.

4. I'm very impressed by the types of webinars offered through MINITEX and OPAL. I watched an archived edition of a MINITEX webinar on ProQuest Newstand, and I found it informative, interesting, and easy to follow. I use ProQuest every day, but I learned a few things about how various newspapers are entered into ProQuest, which in turn means that various searching strategies need to be used. I like the fact that several of the MINITEX webinars have archived editions available, which can take the place of a new edition if the new one happens to be scheduled at an inconvenient time.