GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

iPads might be good for tracking student behavior and playing interactive learning games. But they’re not the best for checking Department of Education email accounts.

The department will no longer allow people with @schools.nyc.gov email addresses to manage their accounts through their iPad, iTouch, and Google Android devices, according to an email sent last week by an official in the DOE’s Division of Instructional and Information Technology. (I saw the letter on the NYC Education News email list.)

The official, Tom Kambouras, said many DOE employees had adopted the new devices in recent months.

“While these devices are changing the way we do our business, it has [sic] also presented us with a few IT challenges as well,” Kambouras wrote. A major one, he said, is that syncing accounts to some mobile devices has stretched the department’s email server to capacity — meaning that there can be “no exceptions” to the new policy.

The problem is neither universal nor totally debilitating: DOE employees who tote Blackberries, which the department has for years issued to some officials, will still be able to access their email accounts. And until the server problem is fixed, iPad users can check their DOE email through their web browsers.

Still, the new policy is a reminder that in the department’s race to adopt new technologies, infrastructure can be an obstacle. (more…)