Friday, November 13, 2015

Sol 11: Award Mystery Achievements Through Email Signatures

TL;DR: Once students reach a mystery level they fill out a quick form, give to teacher, and receive an email with the reward. 
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How do students find out what the mystery achievement is once they've earn it?

This is a follow up to the article, Reel In Student Interest With Mystery Rewards. In that post I mentioned how to motivate students by adding a sense of mystery to the rewards sheet. After establishing that motivation I was soon faced with a new problem: How do I reveal the mystery rewards to students once they earn them?

A solution that does not work:

Teacher writing down the mystery reward on the student's personal reward sheet (takes too much time + I have messy handwriting).

A solution that does work:
Students fill out a ticket (as seen in the image below) and the teacher emails mystery reward details quickly using custom email signatures (procedures below).




How to create a mystery reward email signature in Outlook?
1. Open Outlook 'Preferences'
2. Click 'Signatures'
3. Click 'Add new signature'
4. Write out the mystery reward for that level
5. Title the signature "Mystery Level ___" (filling in the blank with the mystery level number)


Once the teacher receives the Mystery Level sheet (pink sheet from above) they will then write an email to the student and select the appropriate mystery level signature inside the email.
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My gushy thoughts and 2 cents: 
My students love getting the mystery reward email. That in itself is a reward. Plus, it makes this task a lot easier for me. Hopefully someday I can get an app developed to do this automatically to create a smaller feedback look. Hrm?

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