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.
Want to communicate with parents of an entire class?
Ever wish you could talk to all the parents in a class at the same time, perhaps to announce a change in policy, or to let them know about something that happened in class?
Edline gives you that ability. When you’re in the home page for a class, look on the lower left part of your screen and click on “Send email.” Then click on “select all” and down at the bottom “send email.” You’ll get to choose if you want this to go to just parents, just students, or both. Then you’ll have the opportunity to write your email. The editor is plain vanilla – no bold, italics, or bullet points – but you can get a message sent. A copy of your email will be sent to your email address as well, so you have a record of it.
A few caveats:
- · Be sure to remember to include a subject line.
- · Be sure to include a signature (unlike in a normal email program, one won’t be added automatically.)
- · If you copy and paste from Word, formatting disappears – including spacing between paragraphs – so be sure to check through the email to make sure you like the spacing before you send it.
You could also use this feature this to communicate with individual parents, simply by selecting just their names when you first start this process.
