Mail merge & Gmail

One of the most powerful tools I've used in Gmail is a Google Sheets add-on called "Yet another mail merge" (YAMM), which lets you create email templates in Gmail that pull data from a Google sheet to create personalized emails for students/parents. For example, you can create a spreadsheet of the assignments each student is missing, and YAMM will send out a personalized email to each student showing what he or she needs to get done. I'm planning on setting YAMM up this summer so that I can use Gmail to automatically send out periodic progress updates to parents and students without having to sit down and write out several dozen emails.