Back to School Night Pro Tip: Use Google Forms to Make Parent Contact Lists in Gmail

Do you want to e-mail all parents for your class without entering twenty-five e-mail addresses into Gmail? Would you like parent e-mail addresses to populate in Gmail so you don’t have to remember them?

Thanks to a great idea Damien Akelman showed me at Mooresville Summer Connection, you can have parents answer a quick form and accomplish both these goals. Damien’s idea was to have parents input their information themselves into a Google Form.

This is perfect for Back to School night. Have parents use their phones, classroom devices or simply have them meet in a computer lab. Share the form using a URL shortener such as bit.ly or goo.gl.

Your form should have four simple questions. Word the questions exactly as you see here:

This is what parents will see:

When you have collected your responses, go back to editing your form:

This creates a Google Sheet with your responses. In that Google Sheet:

You now need to open the CSV and briefly edit it. This means uploading it back to Google Drive if you are using a Chromebook. It’s a small inconvenience. If you are using a computer with Excel, simply use that to edit the CSV. This is the only edit you have to make:

Save your file. If working on it in Google Sheets, you will need to download it as a CSV again. The key is that you have to wind up with a CSV file on your hard drive. The file should look like this when you open it:

Now go to Gmail.

This will open a new window with your Google Contacts.

 

You will receive the prompt below. Choose the CSV file you downloaded.

You will see the contacts you just imported on the side of the screen. They will be named “Imported Today’s Date (#of contacts).”

This is what you see after you click on the group:

 

This is what you see when you click on a single contact:

Now you can e-mail a parent by simply typing their name in the Gmail “to” field:

You can also e-mail the whole contact list by typing the name you gave it in the Gmail “to” field:

Thanks for reading. I hope this tutorial was helpful for you. Please let me know if you have any questions by commenting below or tweeting at me at @edtechtom.