#117 Useful Google in Education posts this week

Use Google Docs for lesson plan collaboration. Collaborate with anyone, not just teachers at your school site. This template helps you get started. Where to start with using G Suite and Google Apps? Start with collaborating with colleagues and using Google Apps yourself! My lesson plan book used to be a physical book; on my desk. It was difficult to share lesson planning because I had to be physically with my colleague. Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate with anyone no matter where they are. You can easily collaborate on lesson plans with teachers who are not even at your school.

In Gmail there are some settings to customize your Gmail interface and inbox types. Customizing the interface and other components helps users to interact and get a good experience with Gmail
Let’s start by adding a theme to your Gmail accountFor more details please refer the following article http://www.domesticatedbrain.com/tutorials/other/gmail-tutorials/42-how-to-change-themes-and-inbox-types-...

New Features of the New Google Sites - Extended Page Hierarchy - Add up to FIVE levels of pages
Google is adding more functionality to the New Google Sites all the time. This new feature allows you to have up to five levels of hierarchy on your site. Your menu system can therefore have up to five levels of menu and submenu. This video showcases this feature.

October 25, 2017
Google announced yesterday the integration of add-ons with Gmail.. These are third party tools used  to add more functionalities to  Gmail. The same concept was already applied to Google Drive services such as Sheets, Docs and recently Slides. Gmail add-ons are introduced with the purpose of enhancing your workflow, ‘rather than toggling between your inbox and other apps, use add-ons to complete actions right from Gmail. With Gmail Add-ons, your inbox can contextually surface your go-to app based on messages you receive to help you get things done faster. And because add-ons work the same across web and Android, you only need to install them once to access them on all of your devices. Click the settings wheel on the top right of your inbox and then “Get add-ons” to get started.’ Most of the add-ons available now are business oriented and are meant to help businesses ‘connect with customers, track projects, facilitate invoicing’, etc.  We went through the selection and handpicked for you the ones we think are relevant for us as teachers and educators.
colleagues on your device, any time. Automatically view recent communications or save a new contact straight from Gmail. '

Send your paper list to Slides by using Google Keep and the Keep integration with Google Slides. Or use my new add on to do it. I was given… No joke… A 7 page packet of papers with short phrases on it. Carrying around a packet of paper is not something that is going to work for me… So how do I get this into Google Slides? My first step to getting paper into a useable digital format is Google Keep. The Keep app not only allows me to take short notes (and it works offline) but it will extract text from an image to make it editable text. Open the Keep app, add a new note, add a picture of text to the note (either directly into the note or from your camera roll), tap on the picture, find the 3 dots icon and choose to “extract text”, wait for it to come to space and come back as text. (sometimes it’s really fast). Read more...

Looked through your Twitter stream and feel overwhelmed? Let's hit pause and explore five twitter takeaways. We focus on Google Tips in this entry. Jump onto Twitter and you can learn something new. While hashtags make finding relevant content easier, not everyone uses them. Here are my Twitter takeaways focused on Google tips and tricks. From Google Translation in your spreadsheet to email filters to the day the dinosaur died and Google Forms, there’s a lot to explore.

Good teaching always comes first. The best educators know that Technology enhances the learning experience for teachers and students. When information is everywhere, educators must offer a different experience for our students. In my classroom, HyperDocs are Powerful Frameworks for Student-Centered Exploration. I do my best to build HyperDoc activities that get students engaged in the the 4 Cs of collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. I also love the power of Hyperdocs to support student voice and choice. I am working on updating our HyperDocs Mission Control Document and I am interested in resources that enhance the visual appeal of a HyperDocs. The templates on the HyperDoc Resources Page are a great place to start and I am exploring additional tools that can be used to enhance the visual appeal beyond Google Image Search and the Explore Tool in Docs/Slides.

Google tools can make classrooms more efficient, effective and interesting. Here are nine tricks to add to your repertoire. If you’ve never been to a Google Apps for Education Summit and you have any interest in Google in the classroom, this is the place to be. It’s a two-day intense workshop with ideas, tools and tricks flying through the air the whole time. I attended the Indiana Summit recently and came away with plenty of new ideas. The ideas in this post were found or inspired from presentations by Chrystal Hoe, Jeffery Heil, Adam Seipel, Tracy Arner, and Michelle Green. To see resources from all of the sessions at this summit, check out this shared folder. Here are nine of them:

It is essential that our students are able to communicate digitally and visually. However, this also means we need to ensure that students really understand copyright, fair use, creative commons, and public domain. There is a pervasive feeling that anything on the Internet is free, it’s not. If you did not write it; If you did not take the picture; If you did not create it: IT IS NOT YOURS.

Alice Keeler SlideShot Chrome extension takes a screenshot every minute and then automatically creates a Google Slides presentation. Alice says, : "My Chrome extension SlideShot automatically takes a screenshot every minute and saves the screenshot to Google Drive. After selecting “Finish” on the extension, the screenshots are automatically pushed to a Google Slides presentation. Students can submit the Slides through Google Classroom or other classroom procedures for submitting Google Docs.."