Objective:

• Learners will use Edline to communicate with individual parents via email and with parents of an entire class via email to improve home-school communication.

Background

Sometimes, a progress report simply doesn’t have enough information. Sometimes you need to be more personal. Or perhaps you’re starting a new unit which you think parents should know about (I send home an email about To Kill a Mockingbird so that parents know how I am approaching the book, the issues it addresses, and the language in it, for example.)

Happily, Edline provides a way for you to email parents or students, or both. When you need to tell a parent about a concern, give praise for particularly good work, or tell all parents about something that’s happening in your class, you can email either individual parents or all parents in the entire class. You can also email your students, if you wish.

Activities

From your Edline Home page, roll over My classes and shortcuts to see a list of all your classes. Click on the class you want to communicate with (or the class that has the student you want to communicate about). Then roll over Command Center and click on Send email.

You will see a list of all student Edline accounts in this class. You can see, by last name, which accounts are active, which have parent email and which have student email. (Ignore the Administrator system user ID at the top of the page.)

To send an email to an individual parent

Click on the box to the left of student's name to select that student. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click on Compose Message.

Then click on whom to send the message to (parents, students, or both), and click on Continue.

You’ll now have a lot of information.

• You can double-check who is receiving the message by click on Who. (See the picture at the top of the page.)
• Edline will send you a copy of the email to the address shown unless you tell it not to. This is the email address associated with Edline, usually your saint-bernard.com email.

Then you can add subject and the message.

When finished, click on Send the Message to Recipients, below the message.

Remember that email is written and it’s forever, so consider:

• Is email the best way to communicate with this parent?
• Is my tone friendly and approachable? If you are upset with the student or parent, it’s wise to draft your message in Word, then sleep on it, then even get another teacher to read what you wrote, until the message best represents you and SBS.

To send an email to all the parents in the class (at least those who have Edline accounts)

Instead of clicking on the box next to the name of a specific student, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on Select all.

Then follow all the steps for sending an email to an individual parent.

One item you may want to check is the Email Recipient Summary (see illustration at top of page), as this will tell you which parents will receive the message, and which won’t. Click on who to see who won’t get the message; these are parents who either don’t have an Edline account at all, or who have not provided an email address.

You cannot control which parents have current Edline accounts, unfortunately. Every effort is made to get parents to set up their accounts. But if the parent hasn’t provided an

email, and it’s urgent to contact a parent, use more traditional methods.

Easy Formatting of Edline emails

If you have sent emails to parents recently in Edline, you may have noticed a new feature: now you can format your messages, the way you can format your words in Outlook and Word. You can add Bold, italic, bullet points, and so on.

All you need to do is click on Rich Text (to the left of the message you are typing) and you will see the menu which provides many of the functions we have become used to with most email programs.

You don’t have to use the formatting functions, but using formatting can make your email easier to read.

One thing I have noticed is that text may look like there is a separation between paragraphs when you are creating your email, but that the separation disappears in the actual email. So I’d suggest you press “Enter” twice between paragraphs.

Now, assess yourself : Do I use Edline to send emails to individual parents, or to all parents in a class to improve communications between school and home? Take a few moments to reflect about your experiences creating and sending an email via Edline.

If you’re having difficulty, contact the instructor for assistance. Everybody was a beginner once. Even Shakespeare wasn't born knowing how to write plays.

Checklist

• Optional – send email to parent
• Optional – send email to all parents in a class
• Reflection