You know how it is. You give instructions a thousand times a day, but you keep getting the same questions over and over again. It’s not the kids’ fault — especially now! They’re learning from home, on platforms some are just learning how to use, and they are getting so many new instructions all the time. But, teachers are also really busy right now, and responding to the same questions over and over again takes a lot of time.
Leave it to our friends at Google to come up with perhaps the best and easiest Gmail feature for this very problem. This is not a new feature, nor is it very complicated, but it may be my favorite feature of Gmail — Templates!
Now that my students are learning online, I’ve taken all their common questions and put them all into one document with answers — a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document. I wrote the document in Google Docs so I have an extra copy of it to share in our online classroom, but I also entered it into the body of a blank email and saved it as a template. Now, when a student asks a question that’s covered in the FAQ, I simply send the FAQ template along with a friendly greeting and salutation, and that usually does the trick.
Here’s a quick video to show you how to make and load a Gmail template: