Scenario 3 - Sending to a mailing list

Introduction

The facility to send email messages to groups of addresses has resulted in the setting up email forums, or mailing lists, by special interest groups. Mailing lists encourage collaboration between colleagues who are willing to share resources and expertise on local, national and international levels. Membership is free, and their size and activity level varies considerably. When you join a group you send one message to the forum and this is automatically sent out to all the other members. Some forums are moderated, which means that there is a person, or group of people, who take responsibility for ensuring that messages conform to the forum’s code of behaviour, known as its netiquette. The moderators can remove members who do not conform to the list’s code of behaviour.

Example 3a

A teacher in a special school for pupils with severe learning difficulties decided that joining a mailing list might support her in her professional practice. Using her Web browsing software she logged onto the Becta Web site to look at the descriptions of the forums hosted by them: www.becta.org.uk/inclusion/discussion/
The SLD forum seemed most appropriate to her needs so she clicked on the link to their archives to see what sort of messages had been sent in the past. The messages were very useful so she followed the on-screen instructions for joining the forum.

Key skills and equipment

The key skills for the above example are:

• logging on to the Internet
• entering a Web site URL
• using hyperlinks
• joining an electronic mailing list
• finding information from a Web site
• finding information from archives

The key equipment is:

• a computer linked to the Internet
• email and Web-browsing software

Becta hosts several moderated email forums:
SENCO forum is for discussing issues relating to the work of Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators
SENIT forum is for those with particular interests in finding out about IT solutions to support pupils with Special Educational Needs
SLD forum is for professionals involved in the education of learners with severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties Information on the mailing lists currently hosted by Becta can be found on the Web page www.becta.org.uk/inclusion/sen/discussion/

Many more are hosted by Mailbase www.mailbase.ac.uk

Example 3b

The ICT co-ordinator of a special school for learners with physical disabilities wanted support in finding solutions to the school’s access needs. A colleague in another school gave him a leaflet about the SENIT electronic forum, so he joined. The first message he received from the forum was the introductory Welcome file that gave advice on participating in discussions and outlined the group’s netiquette. After that he received copies of all the messages sent to the forum.

At first he read every message, following threads of interest but not participating. This was rather time-consuming so he began to delete messages unopened if he was not interested in the subject line.

When he felt he could add something useful to a discussion he clicked on the Reply icon and posted his contribution to the list.

The list asks members to add a Signature to their messages giving an indication of their role, so he used his communications software to create an automatic signature with his name, job title and school. He also added a sentence to the signature stating that the opinions he expressed were personal and did not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

Occasionally he initiated threads by sending in a question. The number of messages in his In Box grew to an unmanageable amount so he created a new folder and moved all the SENIT messages into that.

Then he configured the email software so messages from SENIT would go straight into the new folder rather than the In Box.

You could explore your own email software to find these options.

Key skills and equipment

The key skills for the above example are:

• joining an electronic forum
• participating in email discussions
• setting up and configuring mailboxes
• adding a signature to email messages
• deleting email messages

• a computer linked to the Internet
• email software

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