Email in the Classroom

(Last revised 04/17/2001)

E-mail Projects for Your Class

If you have email down pat, you now have enough e-mail skills to venture into cyberspace with your class. Besides instructing your students to send e-mail to one another, what else can you do? Read on, fearless leader!

Email Helps You...

Mailing Lists Help You...

Where to Find Mailing Lists

Keypals and Collaborative Projects

E-mail is a wonderful way for your class to connect with students in another part of the country, or perhaps another part of the world. In addition to practicing their English writing skills, your students can learn, first-hand, the geography, culture, and language of their keypals.

You can take this keypal relationship one step further by working on a collaborative project. Is the cost of living in Beaumont, Texas higher or lower than Calgary, Alberta? Do potatoes grow faster in Idaho or Newfoundland? Teach your students how to find and present data for your area, then share it with your partnered class. As a grand finale, compare and contrast the results in a Web site for the entire world to see.

There are several Web sites that serve as registries for classrooms interested in exchanging e-mail correspondence. ePals is one such site with nearly 6,000 registered classrooms worldwide. For collaborative projects, try Global SchoolNet Foundation's project registry. See also Finding Keypals.

Keypals--How to Use

Keypals--When to Use

Web Mentors

As part of your class project on volcanoes, your students are going to interview a leading scientist who is currently observing the volcanic eruptions on Martinique. No, this is not a joke. Opportunities like this abound via e-mail because there is little cost involved in communicating with such specialists.

Mentor programs often include lists of mathematicians, scientists, historians and other professionals who have generously volunteered to assist with class projects. As a consideration to people who are donating their valuable time, compile an interesting list of questions and send it in one e-mail. This will save the mentor from sorting through 20 or 30 individual e-mail messages from your students. For more information on mentor programs and how to search for a topic specialist, check out the Mentoring Center created by the National School Network.

Homework Assignments and Questions

If all your students have regular access to individual e-mail accounts (lucky them!), you might want to distribute homework assignments or bonus questions using e-mail. Perhaps your students can hand in their assignments the same way.

Some teachers even make their e-mail addresses available for homework questions. This, of course, takes a lot of extra time and energy on your part, so an initial trial run may be necessary to determine the volume of mail you will likely receive.

If you plan to use e-mail to distribute assignments and questions, here are some tips that will make things run more smoothly:

1. Make sure your students are e-mail savvy. Before you send your first e-mail assignment, spend a few classroom lessons on e-mail basics.

2. Let your students know the time and day that you will be sending the assignment so they know to check their mail.

3. Be specific with your message subject title. For example: Science Question for Oct. 30th.

4. Instruct your students to use the Reply to Sender button in Outlook Express so you can sort your mail using the subject title that you have specified. Expert Advice

Web Mentor-How to Use

Web Mentor-When to Use

Web Mentor Benefits / pitfalls to avoid

Where to find Experts?

Content Ideas

Art and Music

Math

Social Studies

Language Arts

Science

Email Activities

Email Activities according to grade levels

A Class Act

Were you paying close attention when I was showing you how to add names to the Address Book and how to create Distribution List? We sure hope so because these two features are extremely helpful if you plan to use e-mail in your classroom. Take a look at the following scenarios and you'll see what we mean:

troeleveld@nine-nash.nine.k12.tn.us

Why is it that many educators and members of government have notoriously long, cryptic e-mail addresses? Complex e-mail addresses increase the chances of introducing a typo. And if we add to the mix some younger students with less keyboard prowess than you, we have a recipe for lots of bounced mail.

Make it easier on yourself, and your students, by creating simple Address Book names to replace those long, difficult e-mail addresses. For example, instead of the e-mail address shown above, create an Address Book entry called Mr. Roeleveld or School Librarian. When your students send a message to Mr. Roeleveld, they can just type his name in the To: box.

Are you worried that your students won't be able to spell certain names? The beauty of creating Address Book entries is that you only need to enter the first few letters of a name. Say for instance, your students type ROE in the To: box. Outlook Express will look for a match in the Address Book and try to complete the rest of the name.

ssmith@myclass.edu; rryan@myclass.edu;tthomas@myclass.edu...

One way to e-mail a group of people -- say, all the students in your English class -- is by separating each e-mail address with a semi-colon. This can be quite tedious to type and can lead to quite an extended To: box if you have 25 or so students in your class. Consider creating a Distribution List that includes all of the members of the class. A simple English 8 is a lot easier to type.

Similar Distribution List will make it easier to keep in touch with members of the parents committee or perhaps the teachers' association. Just one word of advice. Keep the e-mail addresses in your Distribution List up to date. If someone leaves the parent committee, remove his/her address from the PTA contact group immediately. Nothing is worse than sending inside information to someone who is no longer involved with an organization.

 

Group 1, Group 2, Group 3...

Your students can also put Distribution List into good use. Say for instance, you have divided your class into groups of five to work on a Social Studies presentation. The kids all have their own e-mail addresses and want to use the Internet for research and to communicate with one another. You can show your students how to create Distribution List that contains only the five members of their groups.

If you plan to replicate the same Distribution List in your own e-mail program, you may want to assign names to the groups rather than leaving it up to your students. After all, Team Pacific and Team Atlantic are probably easier to remember than Spice Girls or The Tragically Hip.

E-mail in a One-Computer Classroom

In an ideal digital world, every student would have a computer on his or her desktop. The reality, however, is the one-computer classroom. Fortunately, the Inbox Assistant in Outlook Express makes e-mail in a one-computer classroom bearable. This feature helps you check multiple e-mail accounts and sort incoming messages to separate folders.

Let's see what the Inbox Assistant can do in this classic, one-computer classroom. Multiple Classes, One E-mail Account Barbara is a high school English teacher. She has classes of 7th, 8th and 9th graders who rotate in and out of her one-computer classroom. Her students don't have individual e-mail accounts, but the school gave Barbara one e-mail address to use with her classroom computer. Barbara is coordinating a collaborative story writing project for four of her classes. Her 7th and 8th graders are going to use Outlook Express to compose stories with partnered classrooms around the United States. How will Barbara manage the flow of e-mail messages with only one computer and one e-mail account?

The Inbox Assistant Solution

Barbara starts by creating four new folders in Outlook Express. She names them Block A, Block B, Block C and Block D. Barbara knows that each of the partnered classes will be using a unique e-mail address. So, she sets up the Inbox Assistant to look for these e-mail addresses. When the program spots one of the addresses in an incoming message, Barbara wants it to move the message to the appropriate folder.

Barbara has set up the Inbox Assistant to automatically sort incoming messages to separate folders. Now, when her Block C students check their e-mail, they simply click the Block C folder. Way to go, Barb!

 

Classroom Set-Ups

With so many options available for customizing the Outlook Express window, you might not know where to start. That's why we've put together this list of Outlook Express set-ups that work well with kids. Choose your favorite, or use them all--it's up to you.

Use It or Lose It

With younger students, the fewer buttons and items to click the better. A simple way to do this is by removing unnecessary buttons and toolbars. For example, if you know that your students won't be using the Address Book, then remove the Address Book button from the toolbar.

A few of the toolbars have the same function as other display items. Take for instance the Outlook Bar, the Folder List and the Folder Bar. All three give you access to folders, but each is presented in a different way. Thus, having all three items visible may be redundant.

Which of the three display items should you use to access folders? That comes down to personal preference. However, if your students are only using Outlook Express for basic sending, receiving and reading of mail, we recommend keeping the Folder Bar. This keeps the items that your students can click on to an absolute minimum. Yet, allows easy access to folders should you need them.

Ordered Buttons

You can also move the buttons on the toolbar so they appear in the same order that your students will use them. For basic e-mail, consider the following set-up for the toolbar:

 

Pretty Previews

          Wide bodies of text are more difficult to read than narrower ones. You can see for yourself by moving the Preview Pane in Outlook Express to different locations. If you position the Preview Pane below the messages, you will have a wide window with long lines of text running from left to right. If you position the Preview Pane beside the messages, you will have a narrower window with shorter lines of text from left to right.

Font size also contributes to legibility in the Preview Pane. The larger the font, the wider you should make the Preview Pane. You can do this by simply clicking and dragging the gray divider between the message area and the Preview Pane.

See if you can adjust the Preview Pane so that there are, on average, 8 to 11 words on one line of text. This length is considered optimal for reading.

Clean Columns

More food for thought. The more columns you have for your message list, the more likely that you'll be scrolling from left to right. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but remember--as your message list grows you will also be scrolling from top to bottom. A viewing area that moves in four different directions is always more confusing than an area that only move in two.

What's our point? Remove any columns that you don't use. For most classrooms, the From column, Subject column and Received column provide enough information for basic e-mail.

Outlook Express in the Classroom is produced by ACT360 Media Ltd. in conjunction with Microsoft Corporation. Copyright 1998.

TAKE YOUR PICK OF OUTLOOKS

Outlook Express is still there--the only thing that's gone is the icon. (Microsoft just assumes you'd rather use something bigger and better.) To restore the Outlook Express icon to your Quick Launch toolbar or to the desktop, just create a shortcut to msimn.exe--typically located in the C:\Program Files\Outlook Express folder--in either location. And of course you should rename it so you know what it is! You can also launch Outlook Express by selecting Start, Programs, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express.

 

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