-tictech message:
In response to the excellent questions about the personal use of OWA:
Q) Is this frowned upon? Is OWA for school business only or
is it a service provided by SSD for our convenience?
A). OWA is intended for school business. The network use agreement that
everyone signs states, "The District's network should be used primarily for
work related and educational purposes." This tacitly permits a small amount
of personal use but it isn't intended as a substitute for a personal email
account.
Q) He is wondering what would happen if someone forwarded an
off color joke or message with inappropriate language. Is the
district sniffing for this sort of thing?
A). If an employee receives an inappropriate message, the employee should
notify the sender that messages of this type are inappropriate for
transmission to a public school system's employees and should ask the sender
not to send any more traffic of that type. The network use agreement
includes in its list of prohibited conduct, "Transmitting or accessing
obscene, pornographic, graphically violent, or sexually inappropriate
material or pictures for a non-educational purpose;" "Using obscene,
graphically violent, or sexually inappropriate language for a
non-educational purpose;" and "Transmitting or accessing material that
discriminates against, harasses, defames, or insults another person, which
includes sending or receiving sexually explicit, racial, or gender
inappropriate jokes or messages."
(We don't "sniff" for this type of thing, but they come to our attention
through referrals, complaints, etc.)
Q) I think there are filters on certain file extensions
.mp3, .avi, etc.) in order to control bandwidth. Is this correct?
A) Certain types of email attachments are either deleted or quarantined to
protect the district from viruses. District network users should refrain
from activities that consume large amounts of network bandwidth for
non-business purposes (e.g., streaming audio/video, online games,
downloading or uploading .MP3 music files, Internet file-sharing such as
Gnutella).
Q) Is there a free email service, like hotmail, out there that
is not blocked by bess? I am able to access my ISP web mail service
from school, and a free service may be a solution to his problem.
A). I have not looked into these options so I cannot comment. We are
looking at options to allow staff to access some of the hotmail types of
free email.
The Network Use Agreement is available on the inside site.
The State Board of Ethics publishes guidelines on the use of email.
Employees are encouraged to review the FAQ's on this site
http://www.wa.gov/ethics/
Please let me know if you have additional questions or concerns.
John
JRowlands@seattleschools.org
-end tictech message. To join, leave, or visit
the message archive, go to tictech on the Web:
http://www.earthdaybags.org/tictech/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 14 2002 - 18:36:49 PST