Building Support Networks with E-mail

by Sarah Clutterbuck

One of the problems of being a special educator in a rural community is that professional colleges may be few and far between. How can you form a support network? This is the same question being asked by many teachers, therapists, parents and other individuals who work daily with special needs people. Even if you have regular contact with your professional peers, there are often areas where you could use some support.

Last year my school, Mareeba State Primary School in Far North Queensland, was connected to the internet via BushNet, our local schools network funded by PCAP. My first reaction to this even was "Wow! That is amazing. It looks so high-tech I don't think I'll ever understand it." Still, in just a few months I was truly hooked. I now have an international support network that includes special needs teachers, parents of special needs students, therapists, software publishers, computer hardware developers, programmers, lecturers, graphic artists and others. It sounds incredible, but it is true. I have daily contact with these individuals and organisations, and this contact has both enhanced my teaching and decreased my stress levels.

Starting off

My first venture into e-mail was exchanging messages with our BushNet support team, Jerry and Melissa Jeffress. Jerry had told me that it wouldn't take me long to meet lot of people on the internet via e-mail, but I was not truly convinced. My reaction was "How can I meet people via e-mail if I only know 2 e-mail addresses?" The answer can be found in many places. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will have some ideas about how to build your support network.

Locating e-mail addresses

There are many ways to find e-mail contacts and below are some of the more common ways of finding addresses.

1. Web Pages - On most web pages you can find an e-mail address, usually of the person who wrote the page, or that of a person to contact for more information. Sometimes, if you are using a browser such as Netscape, you can click on the e-mail address and mail them directly from the browser. The alternative is to copy the address down use it later when mailing. All it takes is a quick - "Hi - I loved the pages you put up on the net" and you have established contact. As a publisher on the World Wide Web, I have to say that a quick note like that every now and again inspires me to put more information and resources up on the net. If the content of the page is not exactly what you need, the author of the information may be able to point you to another source.

2. Business cards and Advertising materials - Check the catalogues you order from, the advertising brochures and business cards for e-mail addresses. These days many companies are online and you can often get more detailed information about a product before you purchase it, or the company can often give you quicker answers to any problems you might be having. When you purchase a product such as software or special equipment, check the packaging for any e-mail addresses. You can use these e-mail addresses for support, more product information, or even just fan mail.

3. Magazines - Most magazines have e-mail addresses, at least for their "Letters to the Editor" columns. Also the help columns in these magazines can be contacted through this method. Often some of the authors of particular sections have their own personal e-mail addresses. If you subscribe to On-Line published by the Low Incidence Support Centre, you may find a few e-mail addresses for people who can give you support with software, strategies, adaptive technology etc.

Listserves

Listserves are electronic mailing lists. You can post questions to them, and answer questions from other people. Sometimes a discussion will develop where everyone contributes their point of view. Each mailing list usually deals with a specific area so you can find one that suits your needs. For example, you could find a listserve for your particular type of computer so that you could learn more about that platform. Included in this article are some listserves dedicated to special needs.

Subscribing to a Listserve

Subscribing to a listserve is fairly easy. Usually you send an e-mail to the majordomo ( a computer programme that organises the e-mail) at the e-mail address. The first time I tried to subscribe to a listserve I had quite a few problems but hopefully you can learn from my experience if you follow the tips below. Unsubscribing is likewise a simple process. You may want to unsubscribe from a listserve before going on holidays to prevent your mailbox becoming overloaded, just as you cancel your newspapers to prevent them from piling up on your lawn.

1. Never put anything in the subject line of the message, unless directly specified.

2. Only put the words requested, for example "subscribe " in the message. This is because the computer is looking for those words only, and any others will confuse it. A message like "Please subscribe spedtalk. Thanks" will confuse the majordomo programme and will result in you receiving an error message rather than a subscription.

3. If you use signatures in your e-mail messages, turn them off before you send the subscription, otherwise the majordomo programme will read the signature as extra words in the message and again you will receive an error message. It took me a few misguided attempts to figure that one out 8^)

4. When you do subscribe, you will receive a message that welcomes you to the listserve. DON'T LOOSE IT!!!!! This message contains details of how to unsubscribe to the listserve if ever you need to. (A handy thing to do for holidays, unless you want 300 e-mails to sift through on your return). I keep a special directory on my hard drive where I save copies of these notices for future reference. If you do lose it, usually you can unsubscribe the same way you subscribe - send an e-mail to the majordomo and put "unsubscribe " in the message.

Some of the listserves are fairly high volume, i.e. you may get a lot of postings per day. On one of the listserves I subscribe to, I get over 30 postings a day and frequently up to 50. Some listserves have over 100 postings per day. If you can't handle that amount of e-mail, you may be able to find the postings to the listserve archived somewhere on the World Wide Web, i.e. you can read them from the World Wide Web instead of having to receive them as e-mail. Also, some listserves, such as Spedtalk, have a digest version where you receive a group of postings rather than each posting individually. If you can't get to your e-mail regularly, this may be the way for you. If in doubt, check with the owner of the listserve. The owner of the listserve is usually mentioned in the initial welcome message

Special Needs Listserves

The following information has been compiled by Doug Doty of the Montana Office of Public Instruction, Helena, MT, USA. For most of the items, the first line is the address to subscribe to the listserve, and the second line is what you should type in the body. If the topic of the listserve is not obvious in the message, then Doug has included a third line which indicates the purpose of the listserve. This 3rd line is for reference only - don't type it in the subscription e-mail. For listserves where you are not sure of the message to send, "subscribe " will usually work. Ignore the " marks.

INTERNET LISTSERVE GROUPS

Various Addresses: These are not discussion groups but addresses that might be contacted for further information.

Other Listserves

Further to Doug's information, I'd like to recommend the QSITE listserve. QSITE community is an organisation of Queensland Teachers who work together to promote the use of information technology in Queensland schools. This list deals with software/hardware, networking, internet issues, policies, projects, professional development and just about anything to do with computers and education. In addition, there are local chapters of QSITE who meet regularly and provide workshops and training.

To join this mailing list, send mail to [email protected], with "subscribe qsite-community" in the message. Once again, ignore the " marks.

Other Australian Education listserves have been compiled on the QSITE web site at http://www.gu.edu.au/gint/ozlists/education.html on the World Wide Web.

E-mail Hints and Tips

You don't need to be online while you compose your letters. If you are paying for access by the hour, you may want to compose your letters on your computer before you link up to your internet server. This way, you are only paying for the time it takes to send the letters, instead of the time it takes to compose them, and you can use the rest of your access time to do other things, such as "surf the net" for information.

Also, frequently we receive messages concerning a virus called the "Good Times" virus which is supposedly transferred via e-mail. This is a hoax but it is such a successful hoax that it has been surfacing again and again for years. If you get a message like this, please e-mail the person who sent it to tell them it is a hoax, and please do not pass it on. It is a harmless message, but it is also annoying (and also embarrassing if you get caught out 8^) If you do get a virus warning, ask your system administrator what s/he thinks as they will be able to pass it on if it is a genuine warning.

You can build a larger support network than you could ever imagine a lot sooner than you can imagine via e - mail. At the time of writing this article, I had only been using e-mail for a year (nearly to the day). I'm just trying to imagine the scale of my network this time next year.

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