Discord for Education

To whom it may concern,

I am writing this email to express an idea that I had for communication among students; this revolves around the use of the Discord.

I live in Washington State and am a sophomore in Interlake High School’s Advanced Learning Program (Gifted IB). From the very start of this school year, the amount as well as difficulty of work was very apparent to everyone as we started the IB Diploma Program. Naturally, we all have various questions regarding assignments and what not but our teachers are very busy as is making it hard for them to quickly respond to questions. Another method would be to ask questions to their peers, but it is clear that not all students have the same access to communication of their classmates.

I created a Discord server back in November of 2019 for the Gifted IB 2022 class with the intent of providing resources to everyone, giving them a place in which they can ask questions to a large group. As of right now, we have 123 members (out of 147 Gifted IB 2022 students in total). A total of 66 channels exist as of right now, moderated by a total of 5 people, with me myself as the owner/leader of this admin team. The server has been in use every single day since it was initially set up, and it has been of great help to students as a whole.

However, our district issued laptops have Discord blocked. This makes it essentially accessible for students that have limited access to devices outside of their school laptops. Given that Discord is marketed towards gaming, the district’s caution against giving students more distractions is understandable. However, Discord is by far my favorite platform to communicate through with the versatility of bots (both premade and student made) and effective organization of servers (channels and roles for different classes/teachers).

Due to this, I had the idea of an “Education” Mode for Discord. Whether it be that certain servers could be marked as “Educational Servers” or it just be a separate part of Discord altogether (I’m not sure what would be the best way to do it), I feel as though it would be an incredibly ideal way to give students access to such an amazing platform while making the decision easy for the school district.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Thank you for your time,

Erik Ma