Three E’s: Email Evolution and Efficiency
Your Educator email solution is an evolving process. It was redesigned to better enable growth. Much like a toddler’s first steps, those early wobbles have given way to sure-footed stability. It’s time for us to evolve into a system that better increases efficiency for you and your students. We have received some suggestions this week that were sent to us from this blog by you, the teachers from FLVS and the franchise network. Let me share a few:
When I reply to a message, the sender’s name disappears. As I move quickly at times or do multiple things, I do not know to whom I am addressing my answer. Is there a way for this to stay up?
Hi, I was wondering if we might be able to see the student’s name in the page for email composing, since students often don’t sign their names in emails, and I might forget a last name. Sometimes I can only read their last name, and I forget their first name while I’m composing.
It looks like the student’s email address is listed, but what I’m wondering about is their first and last names. Maybe it’s just the first name that I need, since the last name is always included in their email address.
See? We actually do read! More importantly, we actually listen. That’s half the job on this journey. Your job is to speak. You can make comments right here or send us some mail. The rest is in our court. We try to understand, weigh the benefits for all, and then take action. We go from your comments to solution. It’s a very simple formula for our mutual success. It all starts with you, the people who make learning happen. Now back to those comments above …
When you click on a student name to compose a new message or draft a reply to email in Educator, you would typically see a form that looked something like this:
Beginning this Friday (tomorrow), you will notice some increased efficiency when communicating with your student’s via email.
From now on, the TO: field will house the student’s name <and email address> like this:
No longer will you need to leave your writing, open another window, or check some stray notes to look up the first name of the student you want. No longer will you need look around and try to save some time by leaving that salutation blank.
Photo Credit : NASA
To summarize what has happened here …
The email system has evolved from a first comment above into an active solution is less than two days!
In the famous words of Dean Martin and the cue card (left) from aboard Apollo 7, “Keep those cards and letters coming in, folks.”
We enjoy turning great suggestions into a reality for you and your students. So … speak up, and let us know what you’re thinking. And thanks for visiting.
Thanks for doing this – this will make us all a little more efficient! it is much appreciated!
Can the new mail system be set up to not save the emails in Educator when they are forwarded?
THANKS!!! So much time will be saved!!
Thank you!! This is awesome!
Awesome!! Love this.
Now, I would love to be able to select (and deselect) students names all at once who are only in my section (and not all the students in the course).
We do appreciate your awesome” comments, and now we could use some clarification please.
What do you mean by “section” here? Aren’t all students in the course shell assigned to you?
It might be semantics here, but we would love to understand.
And thank you again for visiting and commenting.
What a nice time saving feature! Thank you!
I noticed the send and delete button right away. Thank you for the quick changes…and I love the ability to quickly navigate to the blog. It allows me to keep up with what is going on.
I noticed when I sort email by sender it is not alphabetical by last name. In fact, I can’t figure out how is sorts other than putting emails from the same person together. It would be much easier to find student emails with that capability.
Another big problem for me is that I cannot save files that students send to their folders. I receive lots of graphs and hand written assignments because of my content area. I used to be able to keep these in the student folder, so they were part of the student’s permanent record. Now I have to delete them. If a student resubmits an assignment and they had the graph correct, they have to resubmit it because I can no longer look for the old one. If they hand write the assignment because of all the graphs, I don’t have the ability to compare what they did before, which is difficult because they often only send the corrections. Dropping the file into their folder eliminates all these issues.
Is there a way to fix these two items?
Wonderful!! This was needed!
It would be helpful for students to have an easy and intuitive way to upload multiple files to teachers. I often get student comments or questions about how to submit more than one file for an assignment. Thanks! – Thomas Ruszczyk, FLVS
Thank you, Thomas, for commenting and suggesting a new idea for the Educator community to consider.
I have copied your IDEA to our new Educator Facebook page on which we intend to engage dialogue from other teachers and education leadership. Please feel free to engage with other ideas from your fellow teachers. Back soon.