Digital Citizenship

Hello, Mrs. Baker librarian here with another friendly reminder video. This one is about email.

A few teachers have talked to me about receiving emails and a few things that they thought would be helpful for when you send e-mails to them.

First of all, I'm already in my e-mail. Once you log into Google, over in the "nine square" [the Google Apps menu], if you click Gmail, it will take you to your Gmail.

To start an e-mail, of course, you're going to click on Compose. [highlighted cursor moves to upper left of screen and selects a large oblong button with a multicolored addition symbol and the word "Compose", which makes a pane pop up from the lower right of the screen with the words "New Message" in its title bar]

I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit bigger so now I can put in the person I'm typing to. [highlighted cursor selects a diagonal arrow pointing both northeast and southwest in the upper right of the pane's title bar to make the pane become a larger floating window in front of the Gmail screen]

I'm going to go ahead and send my message to Ms. Myers, sixth grade social studies teacher, so I type in who I'm sending it to. [highlighted i-bar in To field of e-mail window types 'rg', which automatically completes into "Rebecca Myers" and shows a pane with a user picture, name, and e-mail address for Rebecca Myers, rgmyers@jeffcoschools.us]

Then here's the first part: Subject. [cursor moves down from the To field to the Subject field and selects that field, turning the cursor to an i-bar]

Subject is not the name as typing in everything that you want your teacher to know right now before you put anything else in. The subject is just what is it that the email is about. It's just a few words, maybe two or three, not a whole bunch. It's not the whole topic of everything that you want them to know. If you type in like three sentences as the subject, your teacher's probably not even going to be able to see everything that you type in because of how the e-mail gets sent to them. I'm going to say that my topic is [typing in Subject field] "Email How To".

So then, there we go. [highlighted cursor moves from Subject field to body field and become an i-bar] I have the person I'm sending it to, Ms. Myers, I have my subject that's not a complete sentence, just a topic for subject.

The next piece is, just like when you're writing a letter, you have to do a salutation. I'm going to say [typing] "Dear Ms. Myers," [typist presses Enter key twice] - just like when you write a letter. I know not everybody does that, which I've been informed of that right now by my sixth-grade student, but we're going over e-mail etiquette right now, so this is ideally how you would send an e-mail.

So after that, I'm going to type in what I need for the e-mail. I might say something like [typing] "I am going to make" -- sometimes you have to spell check, too -- "to make a video on e-mail etiquette. I hope that this helps all of us!" And if there's something else that I need to put in there, I would put that in there as well.

One of the pieces that I know some people need to just double-check and make sure after I type my e-mail, I would go through and I would make sure that it sounds nice. I wouldn't type, "hey, I sent you my assignment, can you grade it now?" because that's not how grading works. That's not how grading works in the classroom either. Even though we're in an online environment now, we still have to be aware of our 'pleases', our 'thank yous', and being patient, just like we are in the regular classroom.

Here's another important part [typist presses Enter key twice], we're going to have a closing. I'm going to say "Thank you," and then - ready? - I'm going to type "Mrs. Baker" and since we have two Bakers, I'll put "Library" after my name, just so she knows.

Here's another piece: when you guys send e-mails to people, a lot of times up here [highlighted cursor moves up to To field of e-mail], it's just going to say your student ID at jeffcoschools dot u-s. That's not super helpful for when teachers get the e-mail, so please make sure that you always say who you are.

You can put it either in the body of the e-mail, so I could say "Dear Ms. Myers, this is Mrs. Baker in the library. I just wanted to let you know that I'm making a video on e-mail etiquette. Hope that helps" or [highlighted cursor moves down to closing of e-mail text] make sure you put your name down here. If you think it's going to be helpful, also say what period you have that teacher if you're asking about a specific assignment.

And if you're asking about a specific assignment, make sure you don't just say "I have a question about the assignment. Thanks, Mrs. Baker". You're going to have to say "I have a question on the assignment on doing a slide show for the country that you have assigned me. My question is..." and then say what your question is.

So just a quick reminder:

• who you're sending it to;
• subject - not complete sentences, just a quick few words about the subject;
• "Dear" and whoever you're writing your message to;
• your message and then - double check that it sounds nice, is appropriate, explains clearly what the question is that you have;
• your closing, in my case it's "Thank you,";
• your name, and if it's applicable, the period that you have teacher.

So when I'm ready, I will go ahead and send [highlighted cursor moves to lower left of email window and over a button that says "Send" in white text on a blue button] - I think I accidentally turned the spell check off, so I might have to double-check that- but when I'm ready, I go ahead and send my e-mail [cursor selects Send button and e-mail compose window closes], and now Ms. Myers has my e-mail.

So just a quick reminder on email etiquette. Thanks!