A Great Email Etiquette Lesson from a Student

This morning, like most mornings, I opened my email to see a bunch of requests for help with various educational technology tools. Half of them I am very happy to answer. Those are the ones in which the sender addresses me by name and makes a polite request. Then there are the ones like this one (embedded below) that lack any kind of greeting or reek of "fix my problem, now!" Those are the ones that I either ignore or reply to with something along the lines of "I'm sorry, I can't provide remote tech support."

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This is the type of email that I get from random people every day. No polite greeting, no mention of my name, just "help me with my problem, now." I like to help people, but if you can't bother to address me by name, my response is often, " I'm sorry, I don't provide remote tech support." #mannersmatter #manners

A post shared by Richard M. Byrne (@rmbyrne) on Apr 11, 2019 at 7:57am PDT

I'm sharing this partly as a rant, partly as a reminder that I'm a one-man show, and partly as a reminder that manners matter. To that end, here's a great lesson about email etiquette. The video lesson was produced by a student for inclusion on Next Vista for Learning's library of educational videos.

Q&A Recording

Yesterday afternoon, as I've done for the last five weeks, I hosted a live Q&A session in which I answer questions that readers have sent to me over the last week. I get dozens of questions emailed to me every week. During the live session I answer those that I think have a broad appeal. The recording of yesterday's session is embedded below.

How to Protect a Range in Google Sheets

During yesterday's live Q&A session I answered a question about sharing a Google Sheet spreadsheet in a manner that would let students edit some, but not all of the spreadsheet's elements. The way to do that is to use the "protect range" setting in Google Sheets. With that setting activated you can prevent your collaborators from editing a particular set of cells within your spreadsheet. I made a new video to demonstrate how to protect a range in Google Sheets, check it out!