For a long time I’ve seen lessons where staff have used the internet. Teachers are getting better at finding ways of using the internet, but I still see lots of instances of straight copy and pasting. Is this a good idea?
Over the last week I’ve been patronised by two different companies who have responded to my enquiry by email. I don’t think either company bothered to read my email properly, just scanned it for key words and then pasted a response.
Boots
I did a lot of Christmas shopping on the Internet at Boots, and am a sucker for their loyalty card points. I’ve been to their ‘Advantage Card’ machines several times and points still haven’t been added to my account. The first time I contacted them, the email I received had a few lines about my pending points and then a huge copy and pasted instruction set telling me visit a machine to collect my points. Hadn’t they read the email I sent? Perhaps it was just me so I tried my card again and contacted them once more. I explained that I had tried my card several times in an Advantage machine and my points had not been added to my account. This is the email I received:
Thank you for contacting us about collecting your pending points from our Advantage Card extra offers kiosks.
To collect your points you’ll need to insert your card into the Advantage Card extra offers kiosk in our larger stores, it looks similar to a cash machine. First it will find your name, and display that on the screen, then it will tell you how many points you have to spend, and they’ll be downloaded onto your card for you.
You’ll also have the opportunity to look through lots of exciting and exclusive offers simply by touching the screen.
How helpful! Copy and paste customer service at its best.
Carbonite backup
I’ve a problem in Windows 7. Carbonite scans the Firefox profiles folder for changes and stops you installing add-ons for Firefox. Disabling Carbonite or excluding the folder from backups stopped the issue so the problem was clearly with Carbonite. This is the copy and pasted response I received from them.
Hello Rob and thank you for contacting Carbonite Customer Support.
Carbonite has been designed to operate in the background so as not to slow down your PC or interfere Internet connection while you are actively using your computer.
It seems like the issue you are facing is not related with Carbonite, but with your system. We request you to please contact your local computer technician for the further assistance regarding this issues.
Please let us know if you need additional assistance.
Sincerely,
Maxwell
Carbonite Customer Support
Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps it’s a generational perception?
Teachers – join me on the quest to stop this abuse of copy and paste by teaching our students when it is appropriate to use copy and paste, and when it is not. And be loud in your complaints when you receive this kind of response from a company – copy and paste customer service = poor customer service!
Last year we started to get to grips with Google Apps, managing to use some of the collaborative tools for entering experiment data, and writing reports as a team. We hadn’t enabled the email because of the lack of filtering. With Google now offering free Postini message filtering to education edition customers, I decided to sign up and see what it had to offer.
The filtering I set up is quite basic. I’ve limited emails to internal emails, and implemented an offensive word filter. I’ve detailed the steps I followed below because I haven’t found a similar guide on the internet. Note that the postini interface could do with a little work to make it more user friendly.
Log into the admin dashboard for your domain. Once you have enabled Postini filtering you need to go to ‘Postini services console’ and then the “System Administration” option. This brings you to a complicated looking screen.
Click the ‘Orgs and Users’ tab as shown below.
Locate your domain and find the entry that ends in ‘Users’ and click on ‘Add sub-org’ to add a group called pupils. This will allow us to apply separate filtering rules for pupils to the staff that use the service.
Next you need to move all the pupils into this group. If you do not move the pupils into this group, they will not get the specific filtering rules. To do this click on ‘Orgs and Users’ followed by users. You then click on the ‘move users’ option. This should bring up a screen like this:
Enter the email addresses of the pupils into the top box (if you have a lot to move you can export the email addresses and then paste them in). This will move the pupils into their own group so you can apply specific filtering rules.
You could also add another group if you wish for pupils who are barred from using the email service, or pupils who you wish to have different filtering rules.
To apply specific filtering rules click on ‘Orgs and Users’ and then select ‘pupils’ from the ‘choose org’ drop down box. This should bring up a busy-looking screen that looks like this:
You will need to enter some rules for inbound services and outbound services. You can change attachment rules, message size and add custom footers (e.g. one with a message explaining the email came from a pupil with an admin contact).
You can find a list of swear words here if you don’t know many!
I inserted the following rules (remember to turn them on when you’ve entered the rule!). In all instances I’ve set the filter to let me know if they are triggered by setting the ‘Copy to quarantine’ option – more on this later.
Inbound services
- Delete (black hole) email where the sender doesn’t include yourname.org
- Bounce email where the entire message matches any word in the list of rude words
Outbound services
- Delete (black hole) email where the recipient doesn’t include yourname.org
- Bounce email where the entire message matches any word in the list of rude words
I also turned off spam filtering in Postini, preferring to let Google handle it all for ease of use. I disallowed pupils access to the message centre in the ‘User access’ settings – again for ease of use.
If pupils do send or receive email from outside the domain it disappears into a black hole. A copy will be sent to the admin quarantine box where the admin gets the chance to deliver the email to its original recipient or delete it. By using this system it is possible to hold all external email until it has been verified by an adult.
Adding another rule deleting all email to your domain but quarantining it would allow you to vet every piece of email passing through your site if you need this kind of accountability.
You will get a daily email from the system if you have any emails that have been quarantined. Log into the admin account but this time select the ‘Message Centre’ or just go to the Postini site. Any quarantined email will be under the junk tab. From here you can either deliver the email (to where it was originally sent) or delete it. You can view the email to check suitability and print out a copy if necessary.
Unfortunately none of the filtering options available allow you to copy email to another account, so keeping a record/copy of email sent isn’t possible without paying to upgrade the service from Postini.
Have you got any useful rules or comments you would like to share? Leave a comment below.
Comments 
Themocracy