Send an email to your future self with FutureMe
February 22, 2011
At the end of our school year, one of my colleagues teaching sixth grade has all of her students write a letter to themselves in the future. She dutifully puts the letters away until the students’ senior year of high school, when she puts a stamp on each of them and mails them to her all-grown-up former students. I always loved that idea of a student writing to themselves in the future. FutureMe gives that idea a 21st century twist by setting up a system for sending an email to yourself at a specified time in the future. You provide the email address, add a subject line, write a note to your future self, and then choose when it should get delivered. You may designate your emails private or public, and there is a gallery of interesting public emails (I did not find anything inappropriate, but you would be wise to check the gallery out before bringing students to the site).
A great time to use FutureMe would be at the start of the school year, as students begin to lay out their plans for the coming year. What if they sent themselves an email about their goals and then received that email at the end of the year? It might spark some interesting reflections.
As a classroom tool, FutureMe works through verified email addresses, so a teacher might need to set up a classroom email account for the site, and then let students use that account to send an email either to a home email address or back to the classroom account.
What would you say to your future self?
