I’ve been thinking more and more about the working habits of students. Most recently today I’ve been thinking about the way in which students submit their work to us. They can do it in a multitude of different ways, and we try to drill in good habits of presentation when students are filling in their books, so why does that fly out of the window when students are presenting their work electronically? Header and footers and pagination are a must in my classroom but I still have problems with the dreaded beast we call email.
I think that perhaps the more we can focus students on ensuring the basics are right and have good habits, the more we can focus on the learning at hand. Also – if we can get those habits right, then actually, we are offering students another golden opportunity to reflect upon their learning and to make more progress than they otherwise would. Why just attach and send a piece of work to your teacher, when you could start the process of a discussion about the work in the form of email? It seems a no brainer to me, that’s why I’m looking to start an emailing code of practice. Not just for work submitted in an ICT lesson but across all subjects. Hands up if your students send work without really giving much away when they send it to you? Let’s get on the case and instil some good habits of presentation in the electronic work of our students, not just in the analogue.
Here are my top 5 tips for learning/literacy filled emails:
1. Start a sentence with a capital letter
2. Run a spell check, not doing so is simply lazy
3. Have a salutation & complimentary close (even better, create a signature in your email client!)
4. Make sure there’s a subject line in your email
5. Explain in the content of the email what you’re sending and why and include an EBI & WWW
If you’ve got a code of conduct for doing this kind of work I’d love to hear from you or if you have any other comments, please leave them below.