Introduction

Recap last week’s introduction to email with the following questions:

• what can you remember about email from last week?
• What things do you need to think about when you’re writing an email?
• What should you check before you click ‘send’?
• What should you do if you receive an unpleasant or suspicious email?

 

Focus on online safety points and using it for school use. Remind students to speak up and report unkind messages, and that users can be blocked and spam messages reported. 

 

CC and BCC

Get all children logged into their email accounts, as in the first lesson. 

Recap composing an email together and discuss the options for CC and BCC and when you might want to use each one. 

 

CC stands for ‘Carbon Copy’ and sends the email to anyone you add to that line, although people you CC are not usually the main recipient.  It’s used when you want someone to know about the email though it might not be directly for them.  Everyone who gets the email can see who it has been sent to.

 

BCC stands for ‘Blind Carbon Copy’ and does the same as CC, except that nobody receiving the email can see that it has been sent to the people in BCC box. This can be useful if you want to send a group email to lots of people but you want to protect people’s privacy and not share all their email addresses with the group, adding everyone’s addresses to the BCC box would achieve this. 

 

Sending more mail

To get them warmed up, if you have a topic that you would like to bring into the lesson, you might ask the children to email you with:

• One fact they already know about the ancient Greeks 
• One things they don’t know but would like to know about the ancient Greeks 

 

Speed challenges

Another activity that students really love is setting an emailing speed challenge! They have to sit with their inbox open and their arms folded. Ask them a simple question (link it to a topic or make it random; e.g. ‘what’s the fastest land animal on Earth?’) and they have to compose an email and place their answer in the Subject line. That way you can have your inbox on the front screen and see and check their answers as they appear without opening the emails. First correct answer into your inbox wins, but you can perhaps give points to the first five. Vary the questions to give everyone a chance and repeat a few times. 

 

Attachments

Discuss attachments, does anyone know what an attachment is? Why might you want to send one? 

There is a limit (in megabytes) to the size of the files you can send in most emails. The size limit will depend upon the system you use in your school. Text documents are not usually a problem, images and videos are often larger files and are more likely to go over this size limit. 

What is a megabyte? Does anyone know how data is stored on a computer? 

Have a look at the video in section 2 of this BBC Bitesize area:

 

How is data stored on a computer?

 

There are other newer ways to overcome attachment size limits, for example, using cloud services like OneDrive to share documents. We'll cover this in our next lesson. 

 

Attachment dangers

Sending and receiving attachments can be really useful, but it they can also pose dangers to us and our devices. Ask the class - can you think of any ways that attachments could be dangerous?

• An attachment might not actually be what it says it is. You might receive something upsetting or inappropriate concealed behind a file with a friendly file name. 
• An attachment could contain a computer virus. Opening the attachment can transfer the virus to your computer, usually without you knowing. 

So how can we protect against these threats? Well firstly we should always check that you know and trust the sender, but that on its own is not enough. A genuine friend might send you something that they received from somewhere else. If they didn't create it themselves it might still be a threat, and your friend might not have realised. So always think about if you are expecting something from them.

Lots of email systems have a preview mini-picture of the attachment at the bottom of the email, so you might be able to look at that and get an idea of what the attachment is before you open it. If it looks suspicious at that point do not open it. Report it and delete the email instead.

Many email systems and internet browsers, such as Chrome, have built-in virus checkers for files you download. Use these, or your own virus protection to scan attachments before you open them if possible.

 

Send an attachment

To be able to practice sending an attachment, the children need a file to send. They could either do a safe search for an image related to your topic, or perhaps create a quick picture using something like 2Paint a Picture. 

Once they have an image, ask them to compose an email to a friend in the class, CC you, the teacher, in so you see they have sent it, add a subject line and attach their picture by clicking on the paperclip icon, browsing for their file and uploading it, before sending the email.

Remind them to reply in an appropriate way to emails they receive.

 

 

Plenary

Recap the main points of the lesson with the following questions:

• Who was able to send an attachment in an email?
• Who received an attachment from a friend? 
• Who sent it?
• What was it?
• What would you do if you received an email with an attachment from an address you didn't recognise?
• Why can unknown attachments be dangerous? 

Malicious email attachments are a major way that computer viruses are spread. When a user downloads and opens a file that contains a hidden virus, it can infect the computer without them knowing. This may damage the computer or enable someone to steal private data from your computer. Some email systems have built in virus scans for attachments, but they are not perfect, so emphasise that they should never open attachments from unknown senders.