3 Ways To Teach Students Email Safety, Mass Emails, and More

Teach your young students how to protect themselves from phishing attacks and how to use multiple email features such as mass emailing.

The internet can be an amazing place for your students to learn about subjects they may have never known about before, but there are still dangers online. It is crucial to teach your students at a young age the importance of staying safe online and on their own email. Are your children or students receiving odd emails from people they do not know? Or are they looking to send mass emails to their friends? Here are 3 subjects to teach on the fundamentals of emailing and ways to stay safe.

3 Tips to Educate Students on Mass Emails, Email Safety, and More

Understand How to Use Email and Mass Email Features

As a teacher, you can give your students the tools to discover ways to maximize their emailing abilities. Photo courtesy of Pexels.

Giving your student a lesson on the basics of how to send an email, use a signature, and send bulk emails can set your students up for success and safety in the future. If your student knows how to benefit from email, it can lead them to fewer mistakes in letting in unknown senders or potential hackers. Your lesson can give real-life examples of why your students should pick up emailing and what value it brings to them so they can see themselves in each of the scenarios. Sending mass emails to invite friends to a party, defining what a spam mailbox is, and what kind of etiquette they should be using in the body of their emails are just a few examples of lessons to use.

Identify What a Fake Email Looks Like

While your students are probably active on social media and are used to texting their friends, emails are a completely different animal to tackle. Texting only includes your friends and family whose phone numbers you can recognize, but mass email phishing attacks can take many forms. Build a lesson that describes what kind of strategies hackers have to trick you to steal your personal information, what kind of information they are looking for, and what steps your students should take to stay safe.

Plenty of students and most people, in general, believe that these hits could never happen to them — which is definitely not true. In 2020, phishing was the most common type of cybercrime and was 11 times more likely to happen than it did in 2016. Those performing these attacks are masters of disguise and designing emails that are believable to the common eye, so it is beneficial to teach your students about hackers before it could be too late.

Consider Kid-Friendly Email Options

Using kid-friendly email services can give you peace of mind that your kids are staying safe. Photo courtesy of Pexels.

If you are not ready for your students to run wild on their own email account, there are paid and free options that allow your children to stay safe under your supervision. With built-in features that still let your kids and students connect with friends and family while educating them on the safety of technology, KidsEmail is a beneficial paid tool. How is this possible? KidsEmail gives adults the capabilities to monitor messages being sent and received, set time restrictions for each day, and gives adults the opportunity to block certain senders.

There are other free services that work equally well to keep kids safe from emails. For children 13 and under, they must create their Gmail account on an app called Family Link that grants the adult access to supervise the child’s account. If your child or student is over 13, there are ways to protect them by adding filters to their Gmail. You will be able to block senders, delete emails that don’t fit your specific filters, and check the account through your own personal account.

As adults in a digital age, almost all of us are using email daily. We are utilizing mass email options, sending important updates through email, and even staying up to date and connecting with friends. Our children and students should be taught at a young age in what ways email can benefit them and how to save themselves from diverse threats.