By Cain Luke, News Editor
By now, everyone has probably heard of the new school emails and how they’re the worst things in the history of ever (probably from friends and not from reliable sources like Pine Whispers). These email accounts designated to each student are just chaos-creating ways for teachers to send you homework assignments that will never be seen because you will never check that email account, right?
Wrong.
Right off the bat, logging into the email is as easy as going to the school website, clicking “user options” at the top right of the screen and then clicking Office365. You may not know this, but Office365 has a service like Dropbox, called OneDrive, that allows you to upload files and access them at other places. Oh yeah, this service also gives each student one terabyte of storage!
How much is that? There are approximately 1,000 gigabytes in a terabyte and 1,000 megabytes in a gigabyte. Since the longest song you have on your iPod is about 10 megabytes, this service gives every student about 100,000 songs worth of storage.
Yeah. Don’t even get me started on how many essays that can hold because the answer is “more than you can write.”
The OneDrive account allows students to connect with one another and share documents for group projects, as well as having a database of every student in Forsyth County for easy lookup.
“We wanted to create an environment where students could communicate,” said Reynolds media coordinator Tom Brandt.
Another big plus to Office365 is that if you download the Office365 app onto your smartphone, anything you have uploaded to your OneDrive has synced and you can edit it on your phone! Need to finish that English paper during first lunch so you can have it done before class? Pull it up on your phone! Have to answer one last question on a lab report before Mr. Bragg chews you out for not having it done? Fix it on your phone!
Having this ability will allow students to be more mobile while doing schoolwork, and since a lot of what students do during classes is on a phone – under the desk – it will make the school day more productive as a whole.
Another thing about these emails that have students up in arms is the changing of usernames from the simple student number login.
“A student’s number is like a Social Security Number, something kind of private,” Brandt said.
The district decided to change from your old seven-digit username to the “four-four-four” username, which has the first four letters of your first name, the first four letters of your last name and the last four digits of your student number.
Senior Katherine Bell shares the same feelings as what seems like an extremely large group of students who think that having a school email aside from a personal one is unnecessary and just adds to the already staggering mountain of things to remember.
“(The school email accounts) are dumb,” Bell said. “They should trust us to have professional email conversations with teachers.”
Contrary to popular belief, having a school email account, unlike having a seven-point grading scale, is preparing you for college.
“Students will have a university address in college, and will need to check it regularly,” Brandt said.
If we can’t check two email accounts, how can we be expected to graduate from a four-year college? There’s even an easy solution for this complaint: Click the gear at the top right of the Outlook screen, click options, find “connected accounts” and there should be a little box that says forwarding. Write your Gmail or Yahoo! account right there and all of the emails sent to your “lame” school account will go right to your personal inbox – no more having to check two mailboxes!
You’re welcome.