Organizing Email for Teachers!
May 18, 2021
If you want to learn how I cut down on the "Request for Access" Emails, check out my blog post here!
Email is something we can't delegate to a couple of times a week, but we definitely can trim it back to a couple of times a day. Here are some email tips for teachers based on my experience as a teacher.
One way that I go through my emails quickly is by starting with my unread messages. I put assignments to be graded into specific folders/labels.
Then I focus on everything else. When I am taking a couple of minutes to check my email and it is a simple question that I can answer right now or forward to someone else to answer, I do it as soon as I read the email.
If it is something I need to come back to later, I star or flag it. Then during my prep or after school, I can click on the "starred" folder and see all the things I need to deal with. Once I reply or finish dealing with it, I un-star it and it disappears from that folder. It is still in my inbox but is not under the "starred" label anymore.
I don't love deleting emails, because you never know when you might need to pull something up again. So, the starred category also holds things I need to reference, like an email about accessing pay stubs or something.
And because we use Gmail, the search feature is incredible and I use it to find almost anything I need.
You can definitely create folders for things you are keeping. Some other folders I have to help me organize are SPED Students (with any info on students I know have IEP's), Warm Fuzzies (emails that say nice things so I can look back at them when things are hard), and School Board (I am on the school board so I need to keep track of these emails.)
I do this kind of shuffling of emails between classes or during a free second in class when kids are working.
Then, during my prep period or after school, I set aside a portion of time to deal with the starred emails and then do whatever I scheduled that day (lesson planning, grading, etc.)
There are also lots of emails that need to be sent throughout any given day. Emails to the IT guy because something isn't working, emails to parents about student misbehavior, emails to students about missing assignments, etc.
I make a plan for about once a month to email all of my students about their missing assignments and schedule that for myself during a prep period or something.
I also have it on my calendar to send 5 positive emails home each week on Friday mornings to help build rapport with families and students.
I also have some templates created that I save as a template in Gmail to help me send things off to parents super easily. If you haven't already downloaded my email templates, you can grab them at the link here.
To set up the templates in Gmail, check out the tutorial video in the Instagram Post below:
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