ePals SchoolMail®365
ePals SchoolMail®365 is where learners communicate. It is the only communication solution delivering enterprise-grade email specifically designed for K-12 use, with SchoolSafe® technology and embedded student learning support. SchoolMail365 enables schools and districts to efficiently deploy next generation communications that connect students, teachers, parents and school leaders for 21st century learning and home-to-school connections. Robust policies govern all email communications and links to third-party learning applications. As a cloud-based solution, the district does not need to deploy or maintain software or hardware, saving substantial resources each year.
- Used district-wide by many leading schools and districts, including the New York City Department of Education
- Automates compliance with COPPA, CIPA and FERPA
- 100% eligible for E-Rate discounts
- Recognized training, support for instant email translation and integration of Microsoft Office Live (Live@edu) infrastructure
SchoolMail365 Promotes Student Engagement and School Communications
Available anytime, from any location, and on any browser-enabled device, SchoolMail365 promotes engagement by providing embedded learning support and enabling classrooms to easily and safely communicate worldwide or within schools. Cross-cultural learning is enhanced through embedded no-cost translation tools that break down email language. Teachers can seamlessly use SchoolMail365 for classroom instruction and can reinforce in-class learning by making home-to-school connections with parents and students. Integrated with the ePals Global Community™, SchoolMail365 provides classrooms access to the world’s largest learning community to safely connect for authentic learning projects.
Features
ePals SchoolMail365 is built on more than 10 years of experience pioneering safe, cloud-based email for schools and districts. SchoolMail365 delivers a full service communication solution for education. Flexible, hierarchical policies set at the district, school and individual level govern email traffic and provide controlled access linking students to learning applications via the SchoolSafe® dashboard. Easy to deploy and manage, SchoolMail365 saves districts time and money while ensuring reliability and scalability.
Cloud-Based
SchoolMail365 is a fully hosted solution, available anytime, anywhere and on any mobile device. Integrated with Microsoft Office Live (Live@edu) infrastructure, it delivers highly reliable, secure communications that are easy to deploy, support and scale across a district.
Enterprise-Grade
SchoolMail365 is the next generation of K-12 email, built on Microsoft’s cloud-based platform supporting Live@edu/Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education. SchoolMail365 is designed for schools and districts that want the benefit of cloud-based email without sacrificing the business-class capabilities and robust K-12 policy management that have characterized ePals solutions and Microsoft solutions, respectively, for decades.
Email has been the greatest motivating factor that I have ever actually seen in my classroom…and when students care, a lot of learning takes place.
— Theresa Cormier
Teacher, Haddam Killingworth School
Role & Group Based Policy Management
ePals SchoolMail365 is the only communication solution delivering hierarchical, K-12 role and group based policies governing all inbound and outbound, intra-school and cross-district email traffic. Based on a unique combination of walled gardens, filtering and user roles and relationships for permissions, these policies enable districts and schools to deliver both rich communications and collaboration in a safe and compliant environment. This patent pending architecture creates the most school safe email and communications solution available today. SchoolMail365 automates compliance with COPPA, CIPA, and FERPA. Learn more about ePals Policy Management.
Automated Account and Policy Administration
ePals SchoolMail365 integrates seamlessly with current and legacy student information to provide simple deployment and automated day-to-day manageability.
SchoolSafe® Managed Access to Third Party Applications
As schools and districts adopt a wide variety of cloud-based digital education tools, managing access, accounts and logins can become difficult. ePals SchoolMail365 solves this challenge with the SchoolSafe® dashboard that provides role-based access linking students to third party services used by the district. For example, a district could grant only high school students access Adobe Acrobat Connect conferencing. The link to this application would then appear for use on the SchoolSafe® dashboard for high school students with authorized access. In this manner, districts can easily manage and securely deploy access linking to learning applications to select groups of students and teachers.
Smart School Directories and Contact Lists
Email address books are auto-populated based on school policies and an individual’s communication rights, eliminating the need to find and manage approved contact lists.
Instant Language Translation
ePals SchoolMail365 can instantly translate messages between over 50 languages through embedded no-cost translation tools. Translation breaks down email language barriers and increases cross-cultural learning. It also helps facilitate a home-to-school communication in homes where English is a second language.
Broadcast Messaging
Send broadcast emails to groups of users by role throughout your district or within a school. For example, email all parents in your district, or all teachers in your school. Administrators can delegate broadcasting permissions to any users they choose.
School and District Themes
Customize SchoolMail365 with your school or district colors, name and logo to infuse your community brand into your messaging platform.
Advanced Filtering
Automated stopword filters, blacklists, whitelists and comprehensive scanning and filtering of images attached to email messages.
Mobile Support
Access SchoolMail365 using IMAP on your Android, Apple IOS, or BlackBerry handset.
Districts, schools and teachers must integrate email into the writing and content curriculum to effectively prepare students in powerful ways for their college and workplace futures…
— Donald J. Leu, PhD
Director of New Literacies, University of Connecticut
Optional Features
In addition to the standard capabilities, SchoolMail365 offers onsite training, email archiving, e-discovery, collaboration, customization and a host of additional services through ePals
Certified Partner Program.
Email Archiving and E-Discovery
Available email archiving and e-discovery provides automated message archiving, on-demand access to email archives and easy retrieval to enable schools to meet fast-changing compliance requirements.
Collaboration: ePals LearningSpace®
ePals LearningSpace® is an award-winning, safe virtual workspace for K-12 communication, collaboration and learning. As a web-hosted solution, it provides greatly enhanced management of collaborative communication tools and stores schoolwork and documents for anytime, anywhere use. Educators have virtual workspaces and web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, digital lockers and more. LearningSpace is optimized for project-based learning, differentiated instruction and real-time collaboration among students and teachers.
Safe and Secure
The patent-pending ePals architecture behind SchoolMail®365 makes it the safest, most effective K-12 communication solution available today. Flexible, hierarchical policies can be set at the district, school and individual level to govern online communications, and a unique combination of walled gardens, filters, and relationship-based permission settings provides controlled access for students. All ePals learning applications are linked via a role-specific SchoolSafe® dashboard.
ePals SchoolMail365 automates compliance with COPPA, CIPA and FERPA regulations, enabling students of any age to communicate with their learning communities safely.
I have discovered ePals to be an excellent tool for educators to use for email communication and global collaboration. ePals provides a safe environment for students to email and learn about cultures within their state or as far as China.
— Winnie Bracco-Borough
Instructional Technology Director – Queens
Division of Accountability and Achievement Resources
New York City Department of Education
SchoolMail365’s policy management architecture offers best of breed security and safety technologies for electronic mail, including:
- Domain Security
SchoolMail365 provides filtering at the domain boundary. Filtering rules can be set for incoming, outgoing inter-domain and intra-domain traffic. SchoolMail365‘s advanced filtering includes, automated stopword filters, blacklists, whitelists and comprehensive scanning and filtering of images attached to email messages.
- Message Security
Customizable message security policies include message monitoring, moderation by a human, and content and attachment filtering.
- Rules Based Controls
Real world, hierarchical organizational structures are established that map to the school district (e.g. district, school, class, grade level). Users are assigned one or more roles (e.g. student, educator, administrator, monitor) and placed within one or more levels of the organizational structure. These roles and relationships are then used as the basis for setting message or domain policies that govern communications by individual users. For example, administrators could set a policy whereby students may send and receive email from any educator in their school and may also send and receive email only from their guardian.
- SchoolSafe® Access to 3rd Party Applications
The SchoolSafe® dashboard provides policy-based access linking students to district-selected 3rd-party learning applications (e.g. Google Docs, Moodle) based on a school’s desired policies.
Designed for K-12 Schools
The architecture behind SchoolMail365™ supports communications within an organizational structure that is explicitly configured for districts, administrators, schools, sub-administrators, teachers, students and parents.
The organization-based architecture enables unique features such as district-wide deployment of policies, delegation of policies for implementation at other levels (such as elementary, middle or high schools), monitoring and school-based policy management by non-IT personnel. For example, districts may deploy a policy that middle school students can only discover, connect and communicate with other middle school students unless a teacher authorizes that student to communicate with non-middle school students.
SchoolMail365 also establishes a district-wide hosted framework under which all school-based communications operate – a feature essential for maximizing the value of an email and communication platform. This makes it easy to execute any function or operating procedure that runs across the school communications network, including account management, maintenance of district-wide access control policies, content search across schools, and interschool web-based communications.
In addition, each school may have its own category within the framework that has its own policies and members. Members of that school environment may or may not be able to participate in the system-wide community, depending on roles and rules set at the framework level.
Schools can even custom design the appearance of SchoolMail365, adjusting aspects such as the color scheme to reflect school colors.
This approach to role-based policies lowers overall operating costs as opposed to traditional email management. Tasks such as student account ingestion are simplified and automated. Simultaneously, the overall community gains the benefit of learning “cross fertilization” with other schools and classrooms within the district and across the globe.
Implementation
ePals provides comprehensive training, customer support and documentation with every implementation of SchoolMail365™ to ensure schools experience the full benefit of this award-winning solution.
Training
ePals will provide administrator training needed for ongoing maintenance of basic functions. ePals offers both online and on-site administrator training with access to online training materials and webinars through a password-protected website. Main topics include how to:
- Implement, maintain and modify hosted web-based communications
- Add, delete and maintain users, defining roles and access controls
- Manage file storage
Customer Support
ePals has extensive experience implementing and supporting district-wide technology solutions. A single point of contact for each school will be provided to facilitate all communications to and from the customer. ePals provides direct support for administrators, which includes online support. A ticket tracking system is used to maintain a history of all maintenance and support issues and resolutions, facilitate prompt responses, and distribute tasks to appropriate departments for resolution.
I am pleased to write this letter describing our satisfaction with ePals as a collaborator for the International Baccalaureate (IB) and its establishment of a virtual community for its over 2,000,000 stakeholders around the world. The technical and program people working with the company have reported to me a very high level of satisfaction in their working relationships, the responsiveness of ePals, and the technical and programmatic skill of the ePals staff.
— Andrea Lucard
Director of Development, International Baccalaureate