New ideas delivered to your emailbox
Part of teaching is sharing ideas with other teachers, and the Internet has made sharing with teachers around the world easier than ever. All it takes it subscribing to an email newsletter. Some of these come daily, some weekly. Here are some you may wish to explore:
Some weekly compendiums of teaching ideas that use Internet resources:
- TeachersFirst is one of the best. Tells you topic area, age group, how tech-savvy you need to be to use a resource, and any concerns (such as potential access to inappropriate content). http://www.teachersfirst.com (scroll to the bottom to signup for weekly enewsletter. )
- National Council of Teachers of English (but you don’t have to be a member) http://ncte.org/newsletter
- Secondary educators http://712educators.about.com/
If you like getting lots of idea every day, here are some daily reviews of teaching resources:
- Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/. Larry works with high school ESL (English as a second language) students, particularly in English and Social Studies. His groupings of resources are among the finest on the Internet, and his ideas are worth hearing. Strong on ideas, but leaves evaluation of appropriateness up to you. (Scroll down – email subscription tucked into right hand side.)
- Free Technology for Teachers http://www.freetech4teachers.com/. Strong on ideas, and a very strong proponent of technology use, but leaves evaluation up to you.
On a more variable publication schedule:
- Pro-Con provides in depth information about many controversial issues. http://www.procon.org/ Very rich resources here. (Email signup is on lower left-hand side.)
Will every idea work for you? No. But you will find new ideas that freshen your approach in the classroom and give you links you may want to add to your class Edline pages to enrich your students’ learning.
How to subscribe. Click on the blue link above. If you decide you want to subscribe, look for the place to subscribe to emails somewhere on the webpage (if it’s hard to find I’ve described its location above). You give your email address, and sometimes will have to verify that you’ve actually requested to receive these emails. Then, every time the publisher writes a new entry, you’ll receive an email. (And each email will tell you how to stop the emails if you decide you don’t want them any more.)
Have you found a good resource like this that you can share with the rest of us?
Edline, Internet tools | Comment (0)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.
Organizing Emails in Outlook
Using Folders or Colors to Organize your Emails
Using folders:
- 1. First, create a new folder to store specific emails in. Click on File, New and Folder.
- 2. Give your folder a new name, and click where you’d like to add it. Wherever you click, it will be placed under. So if you click on Personal Folders it will be under that. If you click on Inbox, it will be under that.
- 3. Drag messages you want to include in this folder from the Inbox into this folder.
- 4. Now the documents are in the new folder, rather than the Inbox.
- 5. You may create as many folders as you like, one for each project.
- 6. If you didn’t like where a folder ended up, right click on the folder, and you will have many options (as you can see to the left). You can delete it, rename it, copy it and so on. Don’t delete it if it already has messages in it, though, or you’ll lose those messages. Happily, if your folder is in the wrong place – say you put it under Inbox when you really wanted it under Personal Folders – drag the folder up to Personal Folders, and it will now appear there (in alphabetical order, of course).
Alternative to folders – Color
If you’d rather not create folders, you can right click on the Quick Click tab for messages. The first time you use a color, you’ll be given the chance to Rename it. You can sort on color and easily put all items you’ve color-coded together.
Sorting your inbox (and searching it):
- 1. You can easily sort your Inbox (or any other file), by clicking on Arrange By and then on a variety of choices, shown here. The default is by Date, with the most recent shown on top. You’ll notice that how it’s ordered is shown directly to the right of “Arranged by,” and this can also be changed by clicking on it.
- 2. You can search for specific text in the message or subject line by entering a word or phrase in the Search Box. To get out of the search results, just press the Escape key (or click on the Inbox in the folder list at the left.)
Reminding yourself to take action – use flags
If you right click on the flag next to a message, you can use one of the flags to remind you to take action.
Delete messages
Finally, if you don’t need it, delete it. When your cursor has clicked on the email, press the Delete button. This leaves you with many fewer messages to search through.
Office | Comment (0)