Use Google Sheets to Schedule and Send Birthday Greetings to Your Students Automatically!

My story
This summer I saw a video on sending personalized automated birthday cards to your students. It piqued my interest and I decided to try it out this year. While there are other ways to collect your student information, I started off with a Google form to collect birthdays and a few other pieces of information from this. I plan to send this out in my welcome letter to students for my classes and post in the week 1 getting started materials.

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Skills/Tools Needed

• Google slides (to create your personalized birthday message)
• Google forms (to create a survey to collect your students' birthday information) - alternatively you can collect the information some other way and then input that data into a Google spreadsheet
• Google spreadsheet (this is where the birthday information is kept)
• Autocrat - an extension for Google spreadsheets (to automatically send the Birthday greeting/card)

Instructions
Click the link below for detailed "How-To" instructions.
Birthday Card "How-To"

Other Uses
If you have the email information for your class from SIS, you can copy that and use Autocrat to send a card or other information working with the Google spreadsheet and Autocrat (send them all a personalized card after the first exam, last week of class, etc)

Link for the video transcript: Birthday Message Autosend Video Transcript

Give it a Try!
The work is front-loaded and you learn a few more tools that can come in handy! Once you get to know Autocrat, I see all kinds of uses for this! You can also set this up for end-of-semester messages to students, some sort of congrats or recognitions, etc. 

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Share your ideas
If you have other creative ways to utilize Google or Autocrat, please let us know at: [email protected]. If you would like to be a CTLA Tech Tuesday guest blogger, please sign-up here: Guest blogger Sign-up Sheet

Your Faculty Liaisons, Jen & Vanessa