Please bear with me.
Osem Jnr # 2 is now away at college all week and we're going to need some practical way of communicating with the staff there on a regular basis - several times a week I would imagine. Previously, when he was at school, we always used a contact book in which daily feedback was exchanged with the school's staff and any important events could be very easily highlighted by us to make them easy to find in the future. Although a bit long-winded at times, we found this to be very useful as it gave us a handy reference to refer back to when necessary. Bear in mind that sadly Junior # 2 can't give us his own feedback so we need to know, pass on and be able to access as much relevant information as possible on his behalf. We may have this option now but the situation's more complicated because there are 2 sets of staff to liaise with, the educational and residential staff, so maintaining separate contact books could become quite onerous and even confusing.
The alternative would be to use email which would have some advantages but would mean, I'm assuming, that we'd simply wind up with a vast number of email messages to wade through every time we wanted to look back at anything we didn't have a specific date for and couldn't easily highlight.
I know email messages can now be handled/accessed as conversations but is there a physical limit to the conversation size? If we were to go down the email route is there any easy way to save/mark/label messages to make going back through them to find something at a later date easier than simply having to read the whole lot?
I'm hoping I'm missing something really obvious and that some highly organised person out there can suggest a way to combine the benefits of a written contact book with the benefits of using email, without necessarily having to print every email and physically annotate it after the event. I suppose putting all the college messages in one folder would be a good start but we'd still just be left with either a huge conversation comprising many messages or a large number of single emails we have no way of annotating or labelling.
I hope I've set out the problem clearly because we'd really like to wind up with a detailed record of his time at college which we can look back on and easily refer to in the future.
TIA as always.
Ps if someone feels this thread would be better elsewhere, please move it. TVM