Once your school has whitelisted the site, I strongly encourage you to test it by adding one or two students. If those students are receiving emails, you know you’re clear to add more students.

Updated 10/21/2020

Schools often block incoming emails to student accounts in order to protect them from predatory emails. This is a good thing! It’s how the school vets businesses to make sure they’re legitimate. However, this site does need to send emails to students for a few reasons:

  • So they can access the site, when you add a student the site emails them their login information.
  • Password Retrieval. If they forget their password, they can reset it themselves quickly.

In the future I may email students to let them know of new courses included in their membership. But I will NEVER send marketing emails to students. Never, never, never.

In order for your students to receive emails from the site, you will need to whitelist it. That essentially unblocks the site so your students can receive the emails. Your technology department can do this for you. Here are the details you should send to them:

Have them whitelist emails from

no-reply@thepracticeroom.net> via thepracticeroom.kinstamailservice.com
wordpress@thepracticeroom.net> via thepracticeroom.kinstamailservice.com

This is really out of my hands. If your technology folks have any questions, they are welcome to contact me at erin@thepracticeroom.net

~Erin

Common Questions

What if my school refuses to whitelist The Practice Room?

Your students will not be able to receive emails from the site, including emails with their login information, and password reset emails.

However, you can manually set passwords yourself and tell each student what their password is. This bypasses the need for whitelisting. Just be aware that you will be managing it every time they forget their password. Some teachers prefer this control anyway.

If you can whitelist, I recommend it, because you get the best of both worlds.

Can you tell if my school whitelisted The Practice Room?

No. I do not have access to your school servers—nor should I. I can only see my side of the equation, which is whether or not emails are going out. I can’t see what happened to them when they landed at your school. Your tech department can help you with that.

Several schools in my school district have memberships. If one school is whitelisted does that mean all the schools in our district are?

Not necessarily. Some schools have different restrictions on different grade levels. You’ll need to check with the tech department in your school.

My school whitelisted the site, but the kids still aren’t getting emails.

This can be because of two reasons:

  • The whitelisting was done AFTER the kids were added.
  • The tech department did not follow all of the whitelist instructions.

I added a bunch of students before the site was whitelisted. Now what do I do?

The login information email that goes out, only goes out once. Removing a student from a group and then adding them back will not trigger it because removing a student does not delete them from the database.

Select all the students from your teacher dashboard and send them a password reset email. They can change their password from there and login. Again, I recommend testing this with one or two students first.

I have just a few students who are not receiving the emails.

The chances of this being an issue on my end are incredibly slim. The chances are higher that the email address was typed in incorrectly, or you’re just not getting accurate information from the student.