Hi everyone, it's Sam Kary from The New EdTech Classroom and welcome to Tech Tip Tuesday.
Today's tip is to automate Gmail responses with templates. My tip a couple of weeks ago was to
reduce time spent outside of class grading by giving in-class feedback and today's tip
is also designed to help you save precious time. One of the many tasks teachers have to take on
outside of the workday involves sending emails and often the content of those emails is repetitive,
especially year after year. So to save yourself precious time, you should start setting up
templates for pretty much every email you send out multiple times. Stick around and I'll show you how.
First let's look at how a Gmail template works. Let's say you're composing an email to parents
about signing up for time slots for parent-teacher conferences. This might be email content you repeat
more than once a year and it's certainly email content you'll repeat year after year. Rather than
hunting around for your old email or typing up an entirely brand new one, if you have a template
all you'll need to do is select that template and it will pull your pre-written email in.
Make a few small changes and you just sent out a detailed email in a matter of seconds
and probably saved yourself a half hour or more of time.
Okay so now to create templates you'll first need to enable templates in your gmail settings.
To access the settings, go up to the settings cog and click 'See all settings.'
Then go over to the Advanced tab. There you'll see that you have an option to enable email templates.
After you've changed the template settings to 'Enabled,' click 'Save changes.' Now to create a
template we'll need to open up a blank email and then type up the body of the email you want to
convert into a template. To help make sure you edit the correct parts of the template when reusing it,
you might want to highlight sections of the text that you'll want to replace with new information.
For example, you might want to highlight the date ranges of your conferences in this email
to make sure you change it every time you send out information to parents about conferences.
Then once you're ready to convert this email into a template, click on the three dots on
the bottom right hand corner of the email, select 'Templates,' and then click 'Save draft
as template.' Next you'll be prompted to give your template a name and be sure to give it a
name that you'll easily recognize from a list, such as "Parent Teacher Conference Scheduling."
Then click 'Save.' Now that you've saved that email as a template, you'll never have to retype it again.
All you'll need to do is open up a new email, go back down to the three dot menu,
and select 'Templates' again. This time under 'Insert Template,' you'll see the name of the
template you just created. When you click on it you'll see that it auto-populates the new email
with the content you already wrote. Just edit the highlighted areas and hit send. Like I mentioned in
the beginning, there's really no harm in creating lots of email templates to save you precious time.
Gmail lets you create 50 of them, so I'd recommend setting up templates for emails such as beginning
of year introductions to families, what to do if you're absent, checking in about missing work,
field trip logistics, special events, parent correspondences that you repeat, etc.
If you have other ideas about emails that you send over and over that would make a good template, drop
those in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching my video to the end. If you're interested
in learning all about how to use instructional technology to increase student engagement,
personalize instruction, provide authentic learning experiences, improve communication with families,
optimize your organization systems, and so much more, then check out my online course, The 21st
Century Classroom. In the video description you'll find a link to 21centuryclass.com
where you can learn more about the course, as well as sign up for the latest enrollment updates.
In the video description you'll also find the link to my website, where you can find additional
resources for teaching with technology, as well as links to my social media accounts on Twitter,
Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok, where I post 60 second quick tips
about teaching with technology. Thanks again for watching and have a great week!