 Communicate with retireesMinimum version: FirstClass 5.5
Audience: Teachers
Experience:
 Features we use:
 SummaryLooking for a way to involve students in the community? Set up a pen pal system between students and retirees. Create a conference where they can communicate with each other, and then add documents that give ideas for discussion and set out rules of communication. You can even add a calendar to schedule group activities.
ExampleJohn Smith is a teacher at Avalon Academy. He decides to set up a pen pal program with a nearby retirement home to encourage students to become more involved in the community.
Set up a FirstClass account
John has his school's FirstClass site administrator set up an account for the retirement home. John visits the retirement home and installs FirstClass on the necessary computers. He works with the home's Activities Coordinator to ensure that all the retirees have the information they need.
Create a conference
John sets up a conference entitled Pen Pals and subscribes his students and the retirement home so that it appears on their Desktops.
He adds the following objects to the conference:
� a group calendar
� a Getting Started document explaining how to retrieve, create, address and send correspondence
� a Topic Ideas document with possible questions for students to ask their pen pals
� a Rules of Engagement document outlining the importance of being courteous and respectful
� a subconference for each of the retirees.
This is the Pen Pals conference that John set up.
 Set Permissions
John protects all of the documents he created so that students and retirees can't alter them. He does this by selecting Protected on the Properties form for each document.
He sets the permissions for the conference so that he is the Controller and his students and the retirees are Contributors. He sets All Users to Disallowed.
 For each of the retirees' subconferences, he makes himself the Controller, and the retiree's account a Contributor. He gives students Send access only and sets All Users to Disallowed.
 Setting the conference up this way ensures that students can only read their own mail.
Sending Messages
When the conferences are ready, John has his students write emails to their pen pals introducing themselves. He encourages them to include pictures.
Students address emails to their respective pen pal's subconference.
This is an email a student sent her pen pal.
 As the controller, John monitors the messages between students and retirees to make sure communication is respectful and appropriate.
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