Currently, students are blocked from using personal e-mail accounts on the district's computers.
"We're excited about the possibility of having a system like that because it's just so helpful for kids and teachers," Burbank High School Principal Bruce Osgood said.
"It really kind of closes that home-school loop a little bit."
With both a paid and free option for the e-mail use, each school site will decide whether they need the 50-megabyte accounts, which cost about $1 per student, or the 2.5-megabyte accounts, which are free but feature ads.
"Some elementary schools are going to try just the free version and other sites are going to go-full fledged with the paid version," said Rick Vonk, the district's technology services manager.
The e-mail service will also filter out inappropriate words and pornographic images from the students' and teachers' e-mail and digital lockers, forwarding any offending materials to the school's administration.
Words like "suicide" and various obscenities are flagged for referral if found in the contents of an e-mail on the Gaggle system, and teachers can add words to the filter list at their discretion.
Students at Burbank and John Burroughs high schools and the Burbank Adult School have been using a pilot version of program since the beginning of the school year, Vonk said.
"I love it," Brittany Grant, 17, of Burbank High, said. "I was using it yesterday, like, all sixth period."
She describes it as a combination of the popular networking site Myspace.com and a photo-storage site.
Gaggle includes profile spaces for students where they can post photos of themselves and a limited amount of personal information related to academics, such as favorite books.
