One universal issue in all schools, especially large ones,  is that teachers get too many emails and it adds to the feeling of being overwhelmed and important information or events are missed due to being lost in a sea that mixes important stuff with less important chat/replies/jokes.

Solution

Schools and especially teams/depts within schools need to divide communications by their type for very important reasons. Now all the Google schools have the solution in one place – Gmail+Chat+Chatrooms.

Here’s the summary:

1. Email –
   Issue: Important emails drown amongst all chat and reaction replies.
   Solution: Email was designed to replace the formal and structured letter communications. This includes the really important communications within the school and to the community. Keep email to long-form formal comms only.
2. Chat – 1-to-1 chat speeds up communications between two people without adding to the email inbox. It’s what everyone is doing outside school.
3. Chatrooms –
   Issue: Teachers emailing a team and team members replying to all as they want their reply / reaction seen by all but this means one email becomes 10, 20, 30 etc.
   Solution: A team or department can organise conversation “Threads” that the whole team can see but that members can choose to follow or unfollow once it’s no longer to do with them. Communications are also reduced by being able to emoji “React” to the original messages without adding another reply message.

This 4 minute video talks you though the differences.