Google Mail is our Educational Answer!

Since the beginning of the year, Ms. Ray, our interventionist, developed a weekly scavenger hunt of math vocabulary words and definitions.  Ms. Kolodzinski, our TAG teacher, has her students create Screen-O-Matic.com videos of examples of the definition in action.  Ms. Letendre, our librarian, has students introduce it on broadcast each morning.  Ms. Barnard, our ITS, adds the word, definition, examples, and video weekly on the front page of our school website.  All this participation by the teachers was getting less and less participation by our students until our students received their Google Email!
Ms. Ray thought what would happen if we emailed the math vocabulary word to the students and let them watch all the places for the definition and send her back the definition to be entered into a drawing.  The first vocabulary word we tried was Prime Numbers.  Ms. Barnard added to the conversation thread by proposing a problem using the vocabulary word.  Her problem was, "Is 51 a prime number?" All this got great response by the students!  Not only can they email their classroom teacher, but now they were emailing the ITS and the Interventionist. They were giving definitions and answering the math problem and one student even used the Sieve of Eratosthenes to explain the answer. When the students weren't quite right, Ms. Barnard was able to give them hints.
The students love their independence with email and are "owning" their learning.  Ms. Ray writes, "I received SO many responses yesterday from students! Much more than the rest of the year combined. It has been really fun. When they have submitted a definition, I have asked for examples, and the students have again quickly responded. Awesome! It makes me really excited!"
Our principal, Ms. Hohmann, writes, "That's awesome!  I'm loving this student g-mail system, too."  She said, " I was able to praise students for their hard work." 
Ms. Letendre includes, "I saw reporters/ anchors who weren't on the air during our broadcast checking their email and responding in the newsroom.  Kudos for using brand new technology to get everyone learning math vocabulary!"