This year teachers and students were put in a challenging situation when it came to getting work done and receiving work. I believe that the school has done a great job using Google Classroom, but is Outlook really the best way to send us notifications? Outlook sends us emails to our school accounts, but not only important notifications they also send us all announcements, assignments and more that gets posted on Google Classroom.

Personally, I do not enjoy using Outlook and I do not like how it works. It fills my phone with extra notifications and it’s just one more place I have to make sure to be checking to get all my information. The extra notifications that are already on Google Classroom make it hard to find the important announcements from the school, which are crucial for the students to know as they could involve hybrid schedule changes. I believe if students are going to need to have an email server then it should be separated from google classroom that way you don’t have to scroll through trying to see if you missed anything important. If students need to keep multiple apps and servers for a great number of notifications, then the information should be specific to the server because what’s the point of getting the same notification five times? Also, Outlook keeps track of all your unopened emails and sends notifications asking you to open them in even if you’ve already seen them in Google Classroom. This could get annoying after a while.

The good part about this is that it sends you to grade updates the minute something changes, but still, there are at least 400 unopened emails I have from one server, not including the other school accounts that send me notifications. I do enjoy getting the emails I need to see like from my guidance counselor and board updates, but I think they should have their own server even if that is Outlook, and separate it from Google Classroom. The separation is important so that students can go to Outlook for school schedule updates and news from East while Google Classroom is just for assignments and grades.

In conclusion, a lot has changed this year and the school is still trying to figure out changes they need to make with assignments and anything that had to be altered due to the pandemic. I don’t like the Outlook server, but I think if just a few things were changed, then it would become a much better server.