E-Rate, Email and Web Hosting
E-Rate is a federal program that helps schools and district purchases Internet services like email and web hosting. Discounts are based the free-and-reduced lunch population of the district, and the nature of the service. Learn More.
Email and Web Hosting
School Loop is an online application that makes it easy for people to share information and work together. Email and web hosting are central to School Loop's architecture. Communication tools are embedded into the service in unique ways that make messaging a central part of driving student achievement, and make web sites custom centers of information, communication and collaboration for each member. Please watch this short movie to see how.
LoopMail
School Loop’s email system is called LoopMail. Every member of the community gets a LoopMail account - school staff, students and parents. Unlike regular email, LoopMail is real-name, as is all communication inside School Loop. The system itself is closed; non-members cannot mail in and members cannot mail out except to alternate email addresses they supply. For example, a student can send mail to a teacher and that mail will appear in the teacher’s LoopMail account AND in their external email client, like Outlook.
This model keeps the system safe and secure: No viruses, no spam, no harassment, no anonymity. There is a language filter and all mail accounts are accessible by school administration.
Special Features
Beyond typical email functions, what makes School Loop special is that way messaging is embedded into the service:
-Every assignment is also a mail-based discussion group. All students assigned work are in the group and mail each other while creating a discussion thread about the assignment. That thread appears on the teacher’s homepage and on the homepage of those students.
-At 5pm each weeknight, an email goes out to all parents and students with a snapshot of their personal homepage. This email shows the recipient their current grades (we have an imbedded gradebook), a weekly ledger of their assignments, school news, and more.
-The entire staff has access to a student directory and our custom Student Record. Each of these tools has an email function embedded in it. Clicking on the mail link for a student produces a form that shows all the teachers of that student, the student’s parents, and any other staff member who has added themselves to the loop. This makes it easy for teachers to collaborate, asking each other for support and ideas in working with individual students. It also makes it easy for school staff to gather information from groups of teachers.
-The addressing function of LoopMail itself has built in groups, that allow, for instance, a teacher to easily address mail to all the teachers of their students for any combination of periods, or to mail parents, etc.
-Administration has a tool to push content into the nightly email of parents, using that tool to disseminate news, distribute materials, even raise money online.
Web Hosting.
Most school web sites are organized like a school: The homepage is like the office; teacher web pages are like their rooms. School Loop organizes information around each member, so teachers, parents, students, principals, counselors, everyone, logs into custom homepages.
Making life convenient for users is fantastic, but it's meaningless unless information is published. School Loop is as easy as email: Completing a simple form puts assignment information on the right homepage for students and parents, on a series of calendars, in a gradebook, and in a central, internal record for school staff. It also populates a course homepage.
Course homepages are useful centers and a convenient way to make arhived work accessible, to publish notes, and to store the files and links teachers want to make available for an extended period. Every course has a homepage that includes all these features, a calendar, discussions and more. These pages are created on the fly based on the schedule pulled from the SIS, and are easy to update and maintain. Most of the work is done automatically.
School Loop is rapidly adopted and widely used. Schools with an average population of 1500 generate around 400,000 pages views a month. One school with 2300 students generates nearly 1m page view -- unheard of levels. Most schools experience 70 to 90% adoption over their first year, with little training.
Administration
Administration is simple. School Loop is an ASP, an online application [Learn more]. There are no servers, no software, next to nothing to manage or administrate. School Loop integrates with your SIS, pulling your master schedule information. Integration involves mapping only seven fields, and we have software, Sloopy, that copies, 128B encrypts, and sends us the info daily. Registering teachers is as simple as typing in their current email addresses. Parents and students self-register using their IDs; approval criteria are set by the school or district, and School Loop has its own proprietary “challenge” system that helps users monitor their own networks for misuse.