Email to parents in Edline

Using Edline to Communicate with Parents via Email

When you need to tell a parent about a concern, give praise for particularly good work, or tell all parents about something that’s happening in your class, you can email either individual parents or all parents in the entire class. You can also email all students, if you wish.

From your Edline Home page, roll over My classes and shortcuts to see a list of all your classes. Click on the class you want to communicate with (or the class that has the student you want to communicate about).
Then roll over Command Center and click on Send email.

You will see a list of all student Edline accounts in this class. Ignore the Administrator system user ID at the top of the page. You can see, by last name, which accounts are active, which have parent email and which have student email.

To send an email to an individual parent
Click on the box to the left of the information about that student. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click on Compose Message.

Then click on who to send the message to, and click on Continue.

You’ll now have a lot of information.

• You can double-check who is receiving the message by click on Who.
• You can see the email address where replies are being sent. Edline will also send you a copy of the email to this address unless you tell it not to.

Then you can add subject and message.
When finished, click on Send the Message to Recipients, below the message.

Remember that email is written and it’s forever, so consider:
• Is email the best way to communicate with this parent?
• Is my tone friendly and approachable? If you are upset with the student or parent, it’s wise to draft your message in Word, then sleep on it, then even get another teacher to read what you wrote, until the message best represents you and SBS.

To send an email to all the parents in the class (at least those who have Edline accounts)

Instead of clicking on the box next to the name of a specific student, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on Select all.

Then follow all the steps for sending an email to an individual parent.

One item you may want to check is the Email Recipient Summary, as this will tell you which parents will receive the message, and which won’t. Click on who to see who won’t get the message; these are parents who either don’t have an Edline account at all, or who have not provided an email address.
You cannot control which parents have current Edline accounts, unfortunately. Every effort is made to get parents to set up their accounts. But if the parent hasn’t provided an email, and it’s urgent to contact a parent, use more traditional methods.

Edline basics

You may have noticed that Edline looks a little different, so this is a tutorial to walk you through how to

• Set up your Edline pages for the year (most of you know how to do this)
• Copy images and other materials from last year’s Edline pages

If you have any questions, please let me know.

Refreshing Your Edline Class Pages for the New School Year

We have a slightly different home page.

• My classes and shortcuts is where your classes are. See below how to make changes.
• My content is where your “old class materials,” previous year’s classes are. If you want to copy images, assignments, class description from last year, you’ll start here.
• Command center is where your Gradequick gradebook is accessed. (Gradequick is also accessible from the top menu.)

To edit your Edline page

• First roll your mouse pointer over My classes and shortcuts, and you’ll see a list of your classes for this year.
• Click on the class you want to edit
• Click on Contents (on the right).
• To make changes in class description and picture, click on Manage class.
• You can change the class description to something a little more meaningful, but don’t touch the class ID number.

Class Description is a good place to add information about your class.

To add a different image, scroll down, click on Browse, and find an image that you have stored in your computer, for example under . Click on the image you want and the address will be stored on the edit page.

Click on Save and then click on Done.

To copy over last year’s picture, class description, and so on

On your home page, roll your mouse over My Content, then click on Old Class Materials.

You’ll see a long list of classes from previous years. “Be sure you get the class from the correct school year,” says the voice of experience, so look at both the class title and the date the page was last modified. Click on the class you want to use. You will see a menu with choices to copy.

Select the items you want to copy over, such as

• Group info (image and class description)
• Links

Click on Copy to.
You’ll have the opportunity to say which classes you want to copy it to (you can copy it to more than one). Don’t forget to click Done.