GILROY
– Teachers and other Gilroy Unified School District staff have
one less excuse for not using their school-issued e-mail
accounts.
GILROY – Teachers and other Gilroy Unified School District staff have one less excuse for not using their school-issued e-mail accounts.
Parent volunteer Rob van Herk has published five user-friendly documents to help staff use the district’s e-mail system as well as access it from outside computers. The manuals, which are available in hard copy and online, will be distributed to all new and existing teachers and staff.
“This gives people some guidance,” van Herk said. “I don’t know if people need training per se. Training might be overkill.”
An increased use of technology, especially e-mail, complements a district goal to communicate more regularly and efficiently with parents and the community. In their ongoing contract talks, the teachers union and GUSD are negotiating a policy that would require teachers to check and respond to e-mail correspondence every two days, if e-mail is accessible from their classroom.
“Because it would take time to walk across campus and log onto a computer, it’s only fair that an e-mail policy like that is part of contract negotiations,” Gilroy Teachers Association President Michelle Nelson said.
E-mail usage, specifically the lack of it, has been a tenuous issue in recent weeks for GUSD. At a March school board session, trustees said they wanted staff to use all the technology at their disposal before investing ever-shrinking district funds into more high-tech equipment and software.
This month, Trustee David McRae was chastised for a frank letter to the editor published in The Dispatch. In the letter, McRae was critical of teachers who did not utilize their e-mail access to its fullest extent.
McRae followed up the letter with another apologizing for how he worded his statements, but did not rescind his basic argument – that technology is underutilized in GUSD.
In response, GUSD staff has asserted that many more teachers would use e-mail if they could more easily access their accounts. They assert that many classrooms do not have Internet access and that phone calling or face-to-face conversation is often a more effective and efficient way of communicating with parents.
A recent survey by GUSD’s technology director, David Pribyl, showed that Gilroy High School is the only campus with 100 percent of its classrooms wired for the Internet. No other campus has more than 40 percent of its classrooms Internet ready.
“We’re actively planning to do wiring for all classrooms in the district,” Pribyl said.
It is unknown how many Internet-ready classrooms do not have computers.
“That’s probably our biggest gap right now,” Pribyl said.
Pribyl said such a room-by-room tally was not required by the state in GUSD’s annual technology report. However, by the end of next month, Pribyl said such a tally would be done.
As for van Herk’s e-mail user guides, Pribyl said they were being reviewed by GUSD information technology staff. The documents should be ready for use by the end of this week.
“We do think that it will be a valuable service,” Pribyl said.
Van Herk has been working with the district since summer on a variety of technology issues facing the district. Earlier this school year, the Rucker Elementary School parent upgraded the GUSD Web site. He still serves as the site’s Web master.
