Land of Lost Emails

Some of you may think this is a no-brainer, but I use these devices so little to send and/or receive emails that it just would not have occurred to me.  I often have the kiddos use the iPods to create items that demonstrate their learning.  Most of them enjoy recording their creations with audio or video, in particular Talking Tom and Songify.  One of the things I have them do once they have perfected their creation to their liking is to email it to me.  (I would have them post it to Twitter or Facebook, but all social media is blocked this year.)

Anyways, I felt like I was hounding a handful of kiddos for their creation; kiddos that I never have to ask for their 'stuff'.  Only to be told by them that they had sent me their masterpieces at least a gazillion times.  Some of them even sent it to me while I was by their side to ensure that the email address was entered correctly.  It was, and still no ping in my inbox.  So what's a persistent virtual teacher to do?

We thought that maybe it was the strength of the wi-fi signal.  The kids went to the various hotspots in the room and tried sending it from there.  No luck.  We also thought that maybe it was connection (this iPod has a reputation for being difficult) so they tried sending me their pieces from home.  No luck.  At this point I was getting a bit frustrated and told the kiddos that I'd look into it a bit once I got home.  

I headed to my handy dandy search bar and typed in 'email not sending from iPod.'  The first thing that came up was an Apple iOS support page.  We had tried the first two things (testing the wi-fi and opening a Safari page to see if content loads).  That was all good.  

Thankfully it was just #4 on the list: verifying the email username and password.  I don't know how it happened (but evidently I'm the one who set it up this way), but I had typed the wrong email address and password when I set up the iPod over the summer. With just a few taps we were good to go and voila!  Songifys and Talking Toms were in my inbox!