College is a fantastic environment to learn and grow academically and also socially and professionally. The ability to efficiently and politely communicate over a variety of mediums with be infinitely useful when you graduate from Penn College and begin you professional career. Practicing communicating over different mediums such as academic and technical writing, email, discussion forums, and live chats while you are a student will help you to learn how to effectively communicate professionally. The Communicate tab will provide you with three options for communicating: Chat, Classlist, and Email.
While you might be wondering, "What's the difference between the Discussion forums and the Chat feature?" the difference is easy to see. The chat feature is a live chat tool that enables you to write back and forth so that you can quickly communicate with your fellow students or professor in real time. Chats are more conversational, can have set times to chat, and have a set group of people. Not every class uses this feature for interacting with each other; mainly distance learning or online only classes will use Chat.
The Classlist is merely that--a list of all the people in your class. The Classlist includes students and instructors, but you can also limit to students only or instructors only. Another great feature is that you select the option to email the classlist. While you probably would not want to make a habit of emailing your entire class, the ability to is a great feature of P.L.A.T.O. You can also check the box next to individual people names to select specific recipients. That can be a great feature for sharing group work if your class has a group assignment.
While you may not use this tool often, P.L.A.T.O. has it's own email tool. When you click on Email, P.L.A.T.O.'s email tool generates an email. You can specify the recipients--this does not automatically email you classlist--the subject, the body of the email, and the attachments. While this email tool does not perform as many tasks as other email services like Outlook or Gmail, it can be a great tool to use. The email is connected to your Penn College email, so you will not have to worry about creating another password or juggling two different email adresses.