Hi you're with Mike Reading from www.GoogleAppsForEdu.com.
If there was going to be one question that I am most consistently asked when I'm speaking
at a staff development day or a conference or with a group of teachers it would be this.
How do I easily send emails to a group of people, whether that be parents or teachers
or students and equally how do I share a document easily with a group so that I don’t have
to have a list somewhere and I'm copying and pasting or typing in email addresses?
Well the answer is there’s two ways that you can do this.
You could ask your Google Apps Administrator to create a Google Group and then place those
people that you want to share the document with into that group.
The other way is that you could just go ahead and create your own contact group just using
Gmail to do it.
And so I'm going to show you how to create a contact group inside Gmail right now.
So here I am in one of my Gmail accounts and you can see over here on the left hand side,
in the top left hand corner where it says Gmail there’s a little arrow next to it
and if we click on that we can select our contacts.
Now I have a number of contacts and I'm going to blow these out so you can’t see their
details but basically your contacts can have their email addresses, their names, phone
numbers and so on.
And you can also tag your contacts or put them in groups.
And one contact can go into multiple groups.
So to create a group on the left hand side you'll see that there is an option that says
new group.
So I click on the new group and I get the option to name the group so I'm going to call
it “demo” for this purpose and click okay and then your demo group will appear for you
in your contacts then.
Now obviously you don’t have anyone on your contact group just yet so there’s a couple
of ways that you can go about getting people into your contact groups.
If you click on the contact group in the list on the left hand side what you can do is just
click on the button that has a person and a plus and it says, “Add to demo” and
you can start to type in some names.
You can also just copy and paste some email addresses in there, just have them comma separated
and you'll be able to add them by bulk.
If you click on the “more” button you'll see that there’s an opportunity for you
to import people from maybe outlook or if you’ve had someone fill out a form and you’ve
collected all their email addresses you can convert the spreadsheet that goes with that
form into a [inaudible] file and you can import it that way as well.
Another way that you can do this if you go to your general contacts is you could simply
just go down and select the contacts that you would like to be added to that group.
When you do that you'll see that there’ll be a button with three heads, it looks like
a group.
If you hover over it obviously it says “group” and you click on it and then you can select
which groups you would like those people to go into.
So if we wanted to then share this document with a group all we simply do is click on
the share button rather than copying and pasting email addresses in we simply type the name
of the group in there and then we select it and you'll see that it drops all of their
email addresses in here.
Now just be aware that when you send an email to a contact group Google creates one email
per person.
Now the reason you need to just be aware of that is that there are sending limits inside
Google.
Now I’ve put up a page here and I’ll drop the link into the www.GoogleAppsForEdu.com
blog so if you go to www.GoogleAppsForEdu.com/creatingcontactgroupsingmail you'll be able to see the link to this particular
page.
But just be aware if you’ve go a Google Apps for Educational Business Account you
can only send two thousand emails a day and if you're using a @gmail.com account that’s
limited to five hundred.
You can also only send to two thousand recipients and only five hundred of those are allowed
to be external.
So just be aware of that there are some sending limits.
Now if for some reason you need to send more emails than that limit that’s where you
need to go back to your Google Apps Administrator and ask them to creat a Google Group.
Once they’ve created that Google Group there’s an email associated with it and Google only
treats that group as one email.
So you can send it to more users that way.
So hopefully that’s been helpful to you.
If you’d like to leave a comment or you have any questions then please just leave
your comment underneath the video or the audio, whatever way you're watching or listening
to this, and we can continue the discussion there.
If you’d like to receive other Google Apps for Education Tips and Tricks I’d love you
to head over to the www.GoogleAppsForEdu.com website.
There you'll find a whole range of tools and information about how you can better use Google
Apps for Education.
Thanks for watching.
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