WORKFLOW – Emailing Groups

by Richard White

2009-11-18

Okay, we’ve been going on for a few weeks now… I’ve been waving my hands about, talking about “technology this” and “productivity that,” and so far, all I’ve really done is waste your time reading this silly blog.

Perhaps it’s about time that we get serious and start looking at some specific Hybrid Classroom techniques that you can use. Let’s start with an easy one.

Email is the backbone of electronic communication, and is the single most important way that I communicate with students (when I’m not in the classroom) and parents. One of the best uses for email that I’ve found is simply using it to keep in touch with my students (and occasionally their parents) on a semi-regular basis.

For most teachers, it’s not practical to email an individual message to every single student. But you CAN easily email a single message to everyone, if you have their email addresses in a group. The brief video demonstration showing how to do this was created using a Gmail account, but the same principle applies to any other email program that allows you to create groups of contacts.

Briefly:

1. Get a list of student email addresses.
   The easiest way is to have them send you an email with a Subject Line like “Conceptual Physics”.
2. Include those email addresses into a custom group…
   perhaps called “Conceptual Physics”.
3. When you want to send out an email to those students…
   enter the group name into the To: field of your email program. You should see the addresses of all the students on that list appear.
4. Compose email…
   being sure to include a good subject line.

It’s up to you what you’ll actually do with your new email prowess. Teachers who see their students more-or-less everyday might choose to reserve the group email for special occasions: giving them a hint on a hard homework problem, last-minute cancellation of a test, etc. Other teachers like to make it a more regular thing, with course schedules for the week, information that didn’t get mentioned in class, etc.

Next time:
The easy way to Email Parents