SMB

In my school, the teachers use SMB (Summary Message Board) to send announcements, infomation, quizes and so on.... I feel it is a really good way for communicating espicially during these days where IT (Infomation Technology) is being used more and more. I find that it is also quite effective, for example if a teacher forgets to tell the students that they need to bring something, he/she can conveiniently use the SMB for that purpose.

Despite all these advantages, I would like to highlight certain problems I encounted while navigating it.

Firstly, since day one, I realised that it is impossible to delete any of the messages posted to you. Only the sender of the message can delete the message he/she sent. Another reason for why this is a problem is that some teachers do not remove messages that they posted even though the infomation is long outdated causing the SMB to be clutered espicially when you are trying to find a message posted a few days ago.

I understand that the school may not want some lazy student to delete messages without reading what it is all about. In these cicumstances, I would suggest that the school develop a system where you can delete the "not so important" messages once you have read them while leaving the more important ones 'un-deleteable'.

A second problem is that sometimes the teacher gives certain instructions to a big group of students which is the exact opposite of what another teacher. Students have no way of clarifying which instructions to follow and may end up doing the wrong thing.

This is exactly what happened today. Today we were supposed to have canoeing CCA (now I am in canoeing CCA, which I did not mess up during the trials....(Refer to Post 2)ok, that is another story), but the other canoeing coach sent us a message on the SMB telling us that training is on Tuesday. Nobody had any idea what to do so we all just stayed back......for no reason as we found out later. The only solution I can think of is for teachers to be more specific when sending out these messages.

Apart from these minor loop holes, the SMB has served its purpose well and more schools should try using it.