Star and Label Gmail messages before sending - organize and follow up

 

Gmail now lets you star and label outgoing messages before you send them. This is a great new feature that allows you to organize messages right from the start.

It can also be useful to help you remember to follow up on important emails by labeling in a category like "follow up" or starring them. You can also do it in the sent folder after you have sent an email.

Educators could use this to organize sent emails by topic (parent communication, student issue, etc.) and then make it easier to follow up on emails that haven't been returned.

 

Source: The Official Gmail Blog 

Related:

Google for Educators resources, tools and tips

Why I use Google's Products as an Educator

My Favorite Resources for Teachers and Students

Google updates image search, goo.gl, and gmail with new features

Google has been busy this week with updates and new features to many of it's products and services. They updated Google Calendar's favicon to display the actual date instead of just "31", A Google A Day puzzle, and Google Docs received pagination and native printing. Now, there are three more updates from Google. These updates will be rolling out over the next few days. 


1. Google Recent Image Search - Google's image search has increased the speed of indexing of images and highlights recent results by showing a small label below the image with the date the image was posted online. This can help when searching for a timely or newsworthy topic and wanting to see the newest images. 




2. Goo.gl URL shortener gets new features - goo.gl is Google's URL shortening service. It has a lot of great features, described here, and just got some improvements. When you create a new short URL on the goo.gl site, the new URL text will be automatically highlighted to make it easier to copy to the clipboard. 

One of the cool features of goo.gl is the dashboard where you can see past url's you've shortened and how many times someone has clicked on that shortened url.  You can now remove items from the dashboard to only keep the ones you really want to track visible.

You can also now report goo.gl URLs that are for spam sites using goo.gl/spam-report. 




3. “Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend). 

As you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.



Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.

All of these updates should make users of Google's products feel comfortable and reassured that Google will continue to support and improve the products that they've come to depend on. 




Reference: Official Google Blog (and images are from here also)


(I've written a lot about Google's apps. I do not get paid or compensated by Google for this. I have found their apps to be well designed and easy to use.)