Email Skills Students Need (& Parents Need to Ensure Students Have)

More than ten years' experience with email has shown us that students need to have the following skills. Students cannot rely on other family members to perform the following actions (because others -- Dad, Mom, Big Brother/Sister, etc. -- cannot guarantee availability on all assignment due dates).

1. EMAIL PRIMARY FUNCTIONS:
   • SEND,
   • RECEIVE, and
   • DOWNLOAD to the local computer's hard drive.
   If student has web-based email and storage space for emails is limited, student must be able to save messages from their instructor and from instructor supervisors, JHU administrators, etc., on their hard drive (and on their back up floppy/CD) to prevent ISP email services such as AOL, MSN, Hotmail, yahoo, etc, from deleting their messages before the course ends.
2. ATTACH DOCUMENTS TO AN E-MAIL MESSAGE.
   Instructors receive student essays in this form, and students may receive instructor comments in this form.
3. COPY AND PASTE (typically taught in elementary school)
   • FROM ONE PAGE TO ANOTHER
     See "How to format the files you will attach to emails in this course," above.
   • FROM ONE DOCUMENT TO ANOTHER.
     Students are required to put all the parts of their assignment into one file, but they may choose to compose those parts in separate files, on different machines, etc.
   • FROM ONE PROGRAM TO ANOTHER. (especially from a word processor document to the body of an email message.
     Some instructors and students must use this method to send/receive essays/instructor critiques when attachments don't work.
4. DOWNLOAD AND SAVE ATTACHMENTS FROM A TUTOR'S E-MAIL MESSAGE TO A HARD DRIVE (AND BACK UP FLOPPY/CD)
   To save instructor comments, etc. Most email programs do this automatically and save to the same directory/folder each time.
5. SAVE AS...