Crabby Office Lady

Kids today use e-mail for everything: passing notes, writing to pen pals, and sending thank-you cards. So they can't avoid you if you're dialed up and waiting in their Inbox with homework assignments. Just stay out of their chat rooms, will you?

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The kids have fled your classroom before you've had the opportunity to rake your nails across the chalkboard to get their attention and say, "Remember, there may be a pop quiz sometime in the next month that will count as half of your grade!" (Yes, you're always thinking; that's why you and I get along so well.) How do you know they heard the last thing you said?

Sure, it's the kids' responsibility to listen and follow directions, but it's just so dang easy to trip them up. All fun aside, kids are kids and they have a lot on their minds these days. ("Navel or nose ring today? Hmmmm.")

Smart educators know that one way to ensure real communication with students is to talk their talk. This doesn't mean peppering your language — and thereby embarrassing yourself and everyone you know or have ever known — with phrases like, "Hey dude wassup? how r u? i m ok 2."

No! I mean speak to them through e-mail.

 Note   It's true that most kids have an e-mail address waiting and ready for you to flood with mail. However, if one of your students doesn't have e-mail yet, encourage her to get with it and get herself a free e-mail address with MSN® Hotmail®. And when she finally does get on board and gets Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2002, she can access her Hotmail account right in Outlook. But you, you stick with Outlook so you can put all my good advice into practice.

Outlook features won't let them get away with anything

Outlook will keep you organized, connected, and on your students' backs with:

• Contacts   Keep track of all your students' e-mail addresses.
• Distribution lists   Send "bulk" e-mails without having to type in the address of each and every recipient.
• Read receipts    Know for sure who didn't read your e-mail announcing the quiz on Monday and who did (even though she said she didn't).
• Online calendars and calendar reminders   Make sure you're as organized as you can be. (You wouldn't want to miss a single opportunity to hold a parent-teacher conference would you?)
• Outlook Today   Get a handle on what's going on this week, both at school and at home.

Contact lists: Clamp on and don't let go

The first thing you need to do is to make a list of all your students' e-mail addresses. The Contacts folder is your e-mail address book. Use this folder to store the e-mail address, street address, multiple phone numbers, and other information that relates to the student, such as his birthday or prison release anniversary.

When you enter a name or address for a contact, Outlook separates the name or address into parts and puts each part in a separate field. You can sort, group, or filter contacts by any part of the name or any part of the address you want.

 Note   If a student e-mails you before you have a chance to add her to your contact list, just right-click her name in the From field, click Add to Outlook Contacts on the shortcut menu, fill in the rest of of form, and save it.

Distribution lists: E-mail's bowling ball

If you try to go bowling with a billiard ball, it's going to take a very long time knock down all the pins.

Now, think of those pins as your students. You want to reach them all at once. If a billiard ball can wipe out a single pin, imagine what a bowling ball can do. One swing and the job's done. That bowling ball is your distribution list in Outlook.

 Your goal: To send the same e-mail to a big group

 Billiard ball: A single e-mail to a single contact.

 Bowling ball: The distribution list. One e-mail gets the job done.

A distribution list is just a collection of contacts. Once you enter your students' information into the Contacts folder, create one or more distribution lists for each group of people you want to e-mail, such as all your students or just the suck-ups. It saves you from having to type in or select, one at a time, each and every grubby recipient. (I love distribution lists because they save my manicure and protect me from carpal tunnel syndrome.)

For example, if you frequently send messages to your detention regulars, you can create a distribution list called "Detention" that contains the names and e-mail addresses of all hooligans in that classification. When you send a message to this distribution list, it goes to everyone on the list. They see their own names and the names of all other recipients on the To line of the message, instead of seeing the name of the distribution list.

Read receipts: Your own personal watchdog

"You didn't tell us we were having a quiz! This is unfair!" Sound familiar?

Now you can track when your messages are read by using the Read Receipts feature in Outlook. You receive a message notification as each message is opened. That way none of your students can say they didn't see your mail. You have proof, they have run out of excuses, and you're King of the World!

Online calendars and calendar reminders: Outlook's enhanced memory tonic

If you want your students to see everything that's coming up in the next week, month, year, or even beyond, publishing the Outlook calendar may be the way to go. That way you don't forget the nasty details about those research papers you've assigned. And besides, an online calendar is easier to update (meaning: change at the last moment) than a traditional paper calendar. The budding environmentalists in your class will thank you.

Reminders

Any of these sound familiar?

• "You promised us a free day today!"
• "You told me to be here with my parents at 3 o'clock sharp!"
• "After you didn't show up at the restaurant for our lunch date, I gave your anniversary present to the waitress."

Schedule getting you a little out of whack? Neglecting your husband (that furry little guy in your bed)?

When you schedule a meeting or appointment, you can set a reminder to pop up and bonk you on the head to let you know that the meeting is coming up. You can decide when to set the reminder for (15 minutes, one hour, or one week before the meeting, for example), and once the reminder window pops up, you can hit "snooze" on it, just like an alarm clock.

Outlook Today: Your organizer

The Outlook Today page provides a preview of your day. By using it, you can see a summary of your appointments, a list of your tasks, and how many new e-mail messages you have. You can set this page to be the first page that opens when you start Outlook, and you can change the way it appears. What a wonderful way to start the day: See, at a glance, all the fun things you're planning to spring on your students at the last minute. Hey, it's good for them — life is full of surprises.

Makes you want to print that thing out and frame it, doesn't it?

"If you can read this, thank a teacher."  — Anonymous teacher

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.

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