Canva comes through again!

Hello, colleagues! I was thinking this week about the secondary part of my job, being the technology specialist for the building. I love being able to provide answers and training, but I hate that people aren't coming to me for answers or training. It's usually just answering emergency questions, which is fine but doesn't utilize my time very well.

So I decided that, on top of creating the tech tips newsletter once a month, that I would also start sending "digital extensions" of the newsletter through e-mail. I decided to do this after a conversation with another teacher. She stopped me in the hallway and asked how many e-mails I currently had in my inbox. I told her that I have five e-mails in my inbox. She let it slip that she had 14,000 and she needed some solutions to clean up the inbox. She wanted to know what I did to get to such a low number.

• I snooze e-mails that I need, but not in that exact moment, to return to the inbox at a later time. I use snoozing as a reminder technique as I remember to reply to an e-mail or remember a field trip when I need to remember.
• I use filters to automatically delete e-mails that I don't need. I don't need to read e-mails to the whole staff with weekly newsletters (because it doesn't affect my classroom) nor do I need to know who's going to Saturday School (because my students don't have missing assignments to make up). Those e-mails go immediately to my trash and don't clutter my inbox.
• I use labels to automatically mark e-mails I need to read. All admin have a bright red tag next to their name, so I know I need to read those e-mails immediately. Labels also help with archiving e-mails because I know not to delete them, but "save" them in an "external" folder until I do need them. 

What I did for this teacher was use Screencastify to make a screencast explaining how to do all of these things in Gmail. As I was creating the screencast, I knew how handy it would be for the entire staff, but I also know my team enough to know they wouldn't watch a 10-minute video with helpful explanations.

So I used my old go-to, Canva, to create a handout that would work for teachers in a time crunch.

New Gmail by Rachel Jeffrey

I didn't think that the infographic did quite enough in telling teachers HOW to follow through on these ideas, so I made quick 5-45 second no-audio screencasts that shows the viewer what to do.

I hope it helps! I believe in decluttering your life and cleaning/organizing your email inbox is one way to do that (primarily as a teacher)! 

Thanks for reading. I'll see you next week :) 

- Rachel

@historicalipad
My Teacherspayteachers website