Derek L. McCoy

My district, Cumberland County Schools [@CumberlandCoSch] is a Google district. Like a lot of districts, many of our functions have been sent to the ‘cloud’. In addition to benefiting from the integration of many Google apps, our email is now hosted on Google’s servers.

This is the first district I’ve not used Outlook for my email client and as such, I’m missing some impactful features. One feature is the ability to schedule emails. Email is an essential communication tool and most people see it as tool for communicating in the present. Understanding and utilizing a scheduling feature is a is a must of school leaders.

Plan and write your follow ups
All school leaders have important talks with all stakeholders and often need to have them followed up. Using the calendar is a great way to build reminders for follow ups so that we don’t forget but even after the reminder comes, we still have to craft the message [specific for this, write the email]. What better way to plan the follow up than to write the actual email and schedule it to be sent at the specific time you deem would be most beneficial.

The Danger of the Draft
One makeshift solution that’s been shared with me is to type the email and don’t send it, leaving it in ‘Drafts’. While this saves typing the email down the road, you have to remember to go back to your drafts and send the email later. The obvious danger here is without a good reminder in place, you can forget to revisit the draft to send it.

The Boomerang Solution
Boomerang is a third party solution for the scheduling problem. I’ve been using it for several days and it has tested out great. Boomerang is a quick download for Chrome or Firefox. After a couple of quick ‘how-to’ videos, the Boomerang menu item will appear on the Gmail menu bar. When you compose your first email you’ll see a change to your email appearance. I’ve attached a couple of pictures below to show you the changes.

The videos will define how to utilize the ‘Send Later’ feature but curiosity will guide you just as well.

My Use
Next week is our district’s spring break and I don’t plan on sending any emails to my staff as they enjoy their time off. This current week, I’ve had talks with several groups about rigorous instruction and student engagement. Instead of waiting for the Sunday before to sit and craft the email, I have already created the message while it was fresh and scheduled its delivery. This method ensures teachers feel the impact of the conversations we have recently and I can count this task as complete.

Use this feature to help ensure your message gets where it needs to go, when it needs to go and more importantly, is written how you want it to read exactly.