Google Hacks

I delivered some training sessions at my school including a Google Hacks workshop. During this workshop I helped people hack Google Forms and Google Slides, and also taught them how to take control of their Gmail inbox (mine is now pretty much empty for the first time ever! Also I have color coded labels and filters and all sorts of magic making it work well for me).

Here's the presentation, Google Hacks:



On every slide it gives step by step directions for completing the different hacks. I also have linked video tutorials for every tip too.

Voice Typing in Google Docs

Super easy to use! Great for taking notes quickly...and also helps people, like me, to practise speaking slowly and not mumbling! It's not 100% accurate yet, but it will get better!

DMAIL: The email will self-destruct in 5...4...3...2...1

There's a great new Chrome extension called Dmail, which allows you to set an expiration date on emails. I believe this was probably started so that you could email sensitive material, like bank details, with a little less fear, but I can see some great ways of using this in schools too!

When you add the extension you have the option to have the email destroy itself in one hour, one day or one week. The email will not disappear from the recipients inbox (how great would that be), but instead turns into a scrambled up jumble of letters!

Firstly you could send confidential information, which you don't want there to be an email trial for, like information about an incident or confidential information about a student.

You might also want to use it for 'your snooze you lose' type emails. For example, asking if anyone is currently free or sending out a cake alert email!

You may also want to send students emails that they don't necessarily need to have access to after the lesson.

Enjoy!

Circuluar Writing With Google Docs

A teacher came into see me the period before a lesson, asking if I had a tool for circular writing. She wanted everyone to write an opening chapter, then another student to write the second chapter, another the third and so on. Although I could not think of a tool dedicated to do this, we realized that Google Docs was an easy solution!

We started by making a Google Drive Folder, which was accessible by anyone at our school, who has the link. We then created 18 documents, as we had 18 students, and labelled them by number.

We also decided that tasking a student to write the opening chapter would be the most difficult part, so decided to use some writing prompts. If we had more time to plan, we may have written these ourselves, but, as we are short for time, we used some pre-written prompts. I use Pinterest a lot, and already had several folders full of resources to help this, (general writing prompts, sci-fi writing prompts, hero story prompts and dystopian prompts). I chose a mixture of prompts, which all included some text. I'd like to experiment and have some with just images soon too.

Some examples of the prompts used:

We started by having students pull a number out of a bowl, this was the first document they worked on. It also meant that they didn't write the following chapter to the person sitting next to them. We used ClassTools.net for a timer and gave students 5 minutes to write their opening chapter. They then closed their document and opened the next number document. They were then given two minutes to read the chapter, then five minutes to write the next.

Students seemed to really enjoy this activity and they wrote a huge amount! One student was pulled out of the lesson to speak with our principal, so I took over his laptop and got to have the student experience myself and it was great. They came up with very creative plot twists, used fantastic language and responded well to their peers previous chapters.

This is a super easy thing to do in the classroom and I recommend everyone giving it a go!  I am definitely going to collaborate with that English teacher again, as this was such a cool idea and I will share it with our other teachers, including the French, German, Spanish and ESOL teams.

Google Classroom Teacher and Student View

A quick video we made in the summer holidays. I will update it soon and will include some feedback from both my peers and students. It's funny how much you learn just by using something-this video was pretty much shot in the dark, but will hopefully give you some useful information about Google Classroom.

Google Form Notifications

A quick form to show you how to get notified when there are changes made to a Google Form or when someone submits a form. You can set it for a daily digest or an individual email. This is going to be really useful for me for a form I have embedded in my library site, for students, staff and parents to make resource suggestions. It could also be useful for forms that need immediate attention, such as forms to alert staff to technical issues or student bullying. The daily digest is a great tool for forms that you send to a large group of people. 

 Thank you to Michael Horne for showing me this neat trick!

Google Calendar - Lesson Plans for Cover.

I'm spending my day off taking the Google Educator Exams, (I am a bit of a workaholic/weirdo). Although I use Google Apps for Education on a daily basis, I am enjoying finding out little tips and tricks through the courses. I had never thought about using Google Calendar to create and store lesson plans to provide for cover when I am absent - but it is great, and really quick and easy! The two videos provided are not too up-to-date, as one has not got the attachment feature and the second video talks about the event attachments as a Lab. The event attachments are a normal feature now, so I decided to create a short video showing you exactly how you can use Google Calendar for Lesson Plans for Cover.