Email Treasure Hunts

A key skill for the Year 3 students at my school is learning to send emails. We coach them on etiquette for composing and responding, the differences between the fields, creating informative subject headings and much more. We thought it would be good to ground this learning experience in a real world context so we connected with three schools in New Zealand. Our students emailed one another, the modern day pen pal. But to help the students become really familiar with email I devised a number of email treasure hunts using canned responses in Gmail. This was not only a fun way to up skill the students in their use of email, but it was also a vehicle for teaching and revising lesson content in a number of subjects including Mathematics and English. I must give credit to Chris Betcher who developed this lesson idea.

The concept of the treasure hunt is that boys email a teacher created Gmail address placing the answer to a question in the subject field. If the answer is correct a canned response will be sent back with the next part of the treasure hunt. I incorporated images, Google maps, YouTube videos and other website resources into the treasure hunt so that students were exposed to a range of questions and investigative material. I also differentiated the level of complexity so that the more difficult questions were towards the end of the treasure hunt for my extension students. Click here to watch a video in which students discuss the value of this learning experience.

Examples

To try two of these out send an email with the subject start to . The question and answer threads can be accessed by clicking here.

Steps

• Create a Gmail account e.g. mathsexplore@gmail.com
• Log into the account and then on the settings cog on the top right hand corner go to Settings and then Labs and search for Canned Responses and select Enable.
• Compose the first email in your treasure hunt. Make sure the email address is hyperlinked so that when students click on it a new email will pop up with the email address in the To field.
• Click on the arrow in the bottom right hand corner and select Canned Response and then New Canned Response
• This will then prompt a title e.g. Question 1
• Repeat this process for all your questions
• In settings click on the Filters tab at the top
• Select Create a new filter
• Put the answer for the previous question in the subject
• Click Create Filter With This Search
• Tick Send canned response:  and select the canned response for the next question.
• Then click Create Filter
• Continue through your questions. Make sure the answer from the previous question is paired with the next question.