20 Ideas: Enabling students to contact you by email at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

Contact with students outside is a potential minefield for educators. On the one hand you want to enthuse them to such an extent that their learning and motivation goes on outside the four walls of your classroom, but on the other hand there’s all the dangers that go with over-familiarity. Here’s what I do when dealing with students outside of school.

I no longer have POP-based email accounts; I have two GMail accounts, one for personal stuff and one for education-related stuff. I give the latter out early on in the year (pretty much the first lesson in fact) to every student I teach. The fact that it’s not a secret makes it less likely to be spammed. Also, if you mention something about ‘IP addresses’ and the ease of tracking down anyone who abuses the service you provide this is likely to minimise any problems. In fact, I’ve never had anything but positive experiences in contact with students outside school.

Here’s some tips:

Use a big email account - a big account means you don’t have to delete anything. GMail’s ideal as it organizes emails and their replies as ‘conversations’.
Insist on standard English - insist on students using standard, grammatical English in their communication with you. Stress that in contacting you they are not contacting a friend but a teacher.
Keep records - Anything more innocuous than ‘Hello Sir, I’m a bit stuck on x’ needs printing out and filing somewhere. As I also give my email address to parents of my form group, I’ve had a few parents contact me with personal issues to do with students. I printed these out and gave them to the relevant Head of Year the next day along with my reply.
Don’t reply immediately - don’t reply immediately to student emails if you receive one whilst online. Even a delay of an hour is good practice. Otherwise students tend to treat it as if they’re using an instant messaging service.
Be friendly, but to the point - an email to a student isn’t really the place to continue the type of banter which is perhaps OK in the classroom. Text on a screen is much more likely to be taken the wrong way than in a classroom where body language and facial expressions are involved.
Make students aware of facilities - make sure students know of the facilities at their disposal for access to email and the Internet (school/public library/home/friends) so that no-one feels left out or ostracized.
Homework - use email as a way of ensuring homework gets done: let students know that you can email them their homework/worksheet. Of course, if you’ve got your own website you can post materials such as homework on there…
Keep others informed - let other members of staff in your school know that you’re giving out your email address to students, especially your line manager.
Instant messaging - don’t use the same email address as the one you use for instant messaging! (e.g. MSN/Windows Live Messenger)
Subject lines - encourage students to use sensible subject lines. Many don’t use one. In the past I’ve ignored these and when students have complained remarked ‘Oh, sorry I though they were spam - please include a subject next time…’
Don’t encourage laziness - don’t just give answers or preferential treatment. Direct students who ask towards a couple of websites, certainly, but don’t privilege those who are more socially adept!