This site is hosted by Georgetown Day School
Here you will find the ISED-L Charter, information for subscribers, and answers to common questions.
Ellen Berne of Winsor School founded ISED-L in February 1994. Her vision and her dedication enabled thousands of us independent school educators to join with peers in thoughtful conversation about our work.
You can submit for discussion any topic related to independent school education. Please do not send advertisements, messages intended for an individual only, or flames. If you sometimes set your mail account to an "out of the office auto-reply" please make sure those messages are not posted to the readership. If you have any doubt about the appropriateness of your message, seek advice from one of the managers, who are listed at the end of this document.
To subscribe to ISED-L, send a message to listserv@listserv.syr.edu and in the body of the message, write
SUBSCRIBE ISED-L YourFirstName YourLastName
Note that you must include your name to be accepted as a subscriber. (Of course, use your real first and last name.) Do not include any other material in the message. In response you will receive a computer-generated confirmation message, and then all ISED-L postings as they occur.
Signing off ISED-L is similar to subscribing: Send a message to listserv@listserv.syr.edu with body
SIGNOFF ISED-L
Note that you do not need to include your name to signoff.
To post a message to the ISED-L readership, send your message to ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu. Important: This is a different address from the one to which you send subscription requests. Be sure that the subject line indicates your topic and that you have included your name and e-mail address somewhere in the body of your message. This will allow readers to reply to you privately, which is often appropriate. If you are an individual subscriber, your message will be automatically delivered to the the subscription list of about 750 individual addresses and to a number of school bulletin boards. It will also be stored in the archives. If you are not a subscriber your message will be passed to a list manager for approval and then distributed. This extra step is necessary as a defense against spam.
Quote sparingly. Clip just enough to indicate what you are responding to. Don't quote whole messages.
Don't get too techie. Discussions of technology in independent schools are indeed welcome on ISED-L, but our strength is the breadth and range of our participants, who share their ideas on independent school curriculum, management, teacher growth, children's needs, good books to read, and many other topics.
Aim at your target. Make sure that private responses are not sent to the whole list. (Your mail system may make this harder than it should be by automatically filling in the ISED-L address on replies.)
Stay calm. If you find your emotions rising as you read a posting, it's best to wait a day before responding.
Send a message to listserv@listserv.syr.edu with body
SET ISED-L NOMAIL
To resume the delivery of ISED-L postings, do the same thing, except the body of the message should be
SET ISED-L MAIL
To receive only one larger message from ISED-L each day, a "digest" that includes all the postings of that day, send the command SET ISED-L DIGEST
All postings distributed by ISED-L are archived at Syracuse University. This archive is searchable, so you can find past messages on any topic that has been discussed. The URL is
http://listserv.syr.edu/archives/ISED-L.html
Note: This is a new archive location as of early 2004 and is still under development; if you have difficulty using it please notify the managers privately.
Marti Weston
L/MS Educational Technology Coordinator, Georgetown Day School
4530 MacArthur Blvd. NW, Washington DC 20007
e-mail: mweston@gds.org
Curt Lieneck
Director of Information Technology,
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
1362 East 59th Street,
Chicago Illinois 60637
e-mail: clieneck@ucls.uchicago.edu
David Withrow
Director of Technology, Harford Day School
715 Moores Mill Road
Bel Air, Md 21014
e-mail: DavidWithrow@harfordday.org
The managers are eager to answer questions and troubleshoot subscription difficulties. Please direct comments, complaints, questions, and requests to any or all of the addresses above.