📧 How to tame your teacher inbox

🤖 Want to understand all this “AI stuff”?

It’s here. It’s changing the way we work. And it’s going to change things in the classroom.

Artificial intelligence.

• What are its implications on the classroom?

• What about cheating and plagiarism?

• Where is all of this headed?

Get answers in my book, AI for Educators. It’s a quick, engaging page turner that’ll help you start moving forward.

“I read this book in 2 sittings, but I kept revisiting chapters to take notes. Matt Miller does a great job with a candid, straightforward book about AI for educators. His conversational, down-to-earth style makes it feel as if you're having a professional chat in the teacher workroom with him.” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (Amazon: Kim)

“Recommended for any educator who is only contemplating AI as a way for students to cheat. Matt does a super job of helping the reader to think beyond that!” ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (Amazon: soyalba)

📙 Get AI for Educators on Amazon

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

💌 Re-evaluate your relationship with your inbox

The end of the school year is an extremely busy time and your inbox is probably filling up fast with emails from parents, admin, staff and ahem super helpful email newsletters you subscribe to.

If your inbox owns you, it drags you back in time after time without feeling like you’ve accomplished much of anything when you’re done.

But if you can tame your email and have it work for you, you have more time for the things that matter most — professionally and personally.

In our post The Gmail survival guide for busy teachers we share 20 actions you can take to whip your Gmail life into shape.

Here are 5 of our favorites.

1. Create and save common emails with templates

If you've ever felt like you're writing the same emails over and over and over again, this one's for you.

Maybe you say the same thing in emails to parents. Maybe you replicate your response to certain student emails.

It's time consuming. But it doesn't have to be.

Next time you write one of those "I write this all the time" emails, go to the three dots menu in the message (browser version, not app version) before you send it. Choose "Templates" and choose "Save draft as template."

If you want to apply a template, just create a new message and go to the same place but choose the name of the template instead. It'll insert that message, which you can edit and send.

This is helpful even if you have to make certain adjustments to emails before you send them. You can add a placeholder (i.e. "Add student comment here") where you can type custom text before sending.

🎥 Video tutorial: How to create and use template responses in Gmail

2. Create filters in Gmail

If you find yourself moving emails, archiving emails or forwarding emails in the exact same way every time, let Gmail do the work for you. Create filters that automatically take action on certain kinds of emails every time.

Here's how it works. Find filters under the settings cog: Settings > Filters and Blocked Addresses > Create a new filter. Specify the kind of messages you’d like to take action on based on who they’re from, who they’re to, subject, words in the message and more. Then, from there, choose the action you’d like to take: archive the message, mark it as ready, forward it to someone, etc.

3. Organize your inbox with stars

Imagine if you could put little tags on the messages in your inbox, color coding them so you could see what you need to do with them next.

It's sitting right there waiting for you!

You may put a star on an email message before. But one little yellow star isn't where that stops.

In the settings, you can create all sorts of colorful variations of the yellow star to categorize your messages. Just go to Settings and scroll down to "Stars" in the general menu. Drag all the stars -- or variations like exclamation points, question marks, or check marks -- to the "in use" line.

To add a star to a message, click the star ... and just keep clicking to cycle through all the options you just set above.

 🎥Video tutorial: Organize your inbox with Gmail stars

4. Use Keep notes instead of sticky notes

OK, I'll be honest. I still love paper sticky notes. I'll probably never stop using them. But with Google Keep sticky notes sitting right there on the side of my Gmail screen, they offer lots of benefits:

• They go with you wherever your Google account goes

• You can add more notes with the Google Keep app on your phone

• You can put images on your Keep notes

• Keep will read the text in your images so you can search for it

If you've ever put a sticky note on your desk at work and needed it at home, you understand the joy of having your notes with you all the time!

You'll find Keep notes in the rail along the right side of Gmail on a browser. Click on it to open up a sidebar with your notes.

5. Level up your email searching game

I just told you that labels are my life. But, truth be told, I don't look up messages in my labels as much as another way.

I search. A LOT.

I search my email for the name of a sender. I search for a key word in a message. Sometimes, I'll search for messages over a specific time period.

To do that, you need to level up your email searching game. And easy way to do it is to use the settings button in the search bar for an advanced search. It'll let you specify messages using lots of criteria.

When you get even more adept, you'll be able to type some of these right into the search bar. They're called "search operators," and when you learn a few of them, it'll make finding messages so much faster. (I often use the from:, to:, and subject: operators.)

📧Get all 20 tips in our post The Gmail survival guide for busy teachers

💻 Tech Tip

📧Teach your students how to email

Even our youngest students know what an email is and no matter what age your students are they will be writing an email at some point one day.

Writing emails is part of our daily lives (whether we like it or not) and composing them properly is important. Teaching your students how to send an email is a very real-world application and a great addition to your writing curriculum.

Lori Gracey at TCEA has put together a guide for teaching students HOW to email that’s perfect for every grade level.

The guide is packed with resources to help our students send emails like pros.

Here are some resources you can use to help teach your students proper email etiquette:

• An infographic on how to email your teacher

• Age-appropriate email strategies

• Digital etiquette video from BrainPop

• Examples of a well written and poorly written email

• A ready-to-run activity on email etiquette for your class from Quizizz

Check out the full guide here to find resources that work for you and your class. Let’s get our students writing emails that get noticed (for all the right reasons)!

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!