G Suite Gems 18: Don't Do It Yourself (with videos)

Don't Do It Yourself!

1. Explore for great slide design
 If you don't like the designs offered to you as standard in Slides, use the Explore option to create some more for you

2. Creating easy organisational charts in Google Sheets 
Avoid spending ages fiddling around with layouts and updating when staff or structures change.

3. Add an automatic table of contents in Google Docs
It's like actual magic!

 4. Fake sites for evaluating with students
Check out these great AND CURRENT sites for teaching students about evaluating web sources - originally shared by Eric Curts   Fake sites - hours saved searching for or even creating suitable resources. I particularly like this one, sounds very dangerous!

5. Make the students think

I love this kind of approach to thinking and they make great starters or points for discussion around learning. Here's an example, I can't remember where I came across this but show this to your students and see what THEY can tell YOU about what it is telling us. Enjoy!

what patterns can you see? It's a great way to represent familiar material in unfamiliar ways to boost independent thinking.

I've recently set up a Youtube Channel. 

I'm always open to feedback and suggestions so please feel free to drop me a message.

G Suite Gems 17: Reducing workload

G Suite Gem 17: Reducing Workload

5 top tips because I've got that Friday feeling.

Classroom bookmarking: 

If you're an avid Classroom user, why not save yourself a few clicks by adding each classroom to your bookmark bar? Each one can be edited to a shortened name and keeps the theme colour for the class on the bookmark bar icon.   

Equation toolbar:

Ok, so many of you will know of and may have used Equatio from the TextHelp team and it's great, but did you know Google Docs has it's own Equation Toolbar?  

Go to VIEW and Equation Toolbar and type away with lots of different options that are otherwise tricky on a keyboard.

Watch a brief demo here - great for Mathematicians and scientists alike.

Pupil Pref - this is a great Google Doc add on to give your docs a range of colour transparency effects with just one click rather than having to change page set ups. You can change colour in one click, great for any visually impaired readers.  Click here

Voice typing:

Use this awesome function to redraft work, correct errors, dictate letters or even practice your speaking in another language. It's awesome! Watch here

Forms: 

I've been working this week on taking our school's GCSE Options process on to Google Forms. It's very exciting to know that this year we'll almost completely eradicate errors and confusion with students completing their forms as we can control selections available to them. 

No more duplications of subjects, subjects in the wrong blocking, misspelt subjects or ones we don't even run.  Add to that the fact that no-one is going to have to sit for hours typing up the choices made because it all drops straight into sheets and that both students and parents will get confirmation by email of their choices immediately and everyone's a winner. 

G Suite Gems 16: Race against the machine

Race against the machine

As #edtech continues to go from strength to strength, here a few super tips that take advanatge of Machine Learning.

1. Google's OCR
(optical character recognition)

With the changes to GCSE content, I've recently seen and spoken to a number of people who are recycling questions from old text books. Many have sat for hours with the text book and typed up the questions into a worksheet when they could have used google's OCR capabilities.

Now you can simply take a photo of that text book page, save it to drive and choose to open with Google Docs. OCR will do the rest.

 OCR returns this result

It's not always perfect so you may have to correct the odd bit but it's still so much quicker than doing it yourself!   This also works in Google Keep and if you have a Pixel phone, it's a built in option.

2. Demoslams are great! - 3 of the best tips
Earlier this week I watched Lee Webster's Demoslam broadcast (subscribe here) and was delighted to pick up some great new ideas on how machine learning can work for you. I've already used most of them and it's half-term (tinker time).

a) Firstly,  machine learning using the explore function for Google Slide design - I'd never tried this but it's great. Start a blank template. Input the title of your slide and then choose an image from Google. Drag it in (more on that in a moment thanks to the Demoslam) and then click Explore.

let Explore suggest themes for slides

Explore will then suggest a range of slide layouts for you. Smooth and brilliant. 
Why not Watch a quick demo here ?

b) If you've just watched the video above you may have seen another cool trick that the Demoslam shared for bringing images from Google into your docs. If you missed it, have another watch and see if you can spot it. Clue: there's no clicking involved.

c) Resizing images for new google sites - anyone who has been using new sites may have found image sizing tricky, especially in footers, I know I did at first! But then along came the Demoslam and boom!

All you need to do is upload and size 1 image correctly. Then you can just import and drag others over the top and it will "same size" them for you. Then click on the new resized image to move it into position.

3 great additions to my repertoire and I hope you find them useful. Thanks to Lee and all the Slammers involved (sorry I can't remember everyone's names).

3. Team Drive update

If you haven't seen it yet, you can now email members of a Team Drive direct from Drive itself. Really handy! If you haven't got this feature yet it's on a gradual roll out so be patient.








4. Commenting on Drive
With the new addition of being able to comment on PDFs, Office files, videos and images collaboration just got a whole lot more powerful.

Check out how my MFL department are using this new feature to share examples of student work with added comments.

open in new window and the + appears

highlight an area of text

add comments to guide students on what to include in their work

And finally....

Alice Keeler shared this tip for sharing YouTube videos at certain points.

To share a Youtube video from a certain starting point , right click on the video as it's playing and select copy video URL at current time and share this link. Awesome!

G Suite Gems 15: whatever happened to the language lab?

Whatever happened to the language lab?

As a language teacher (amongst other things), I often hark back to when I was at 6th form, studying French, German and Spanish, using what seemed like incredible technology.

For those who don't have the luxury of remembering that far back, there we'd all sit, around 25 of us in a language lab with our individual booths and headphones. The teacher had readied a recording for us to listen to and around came a worksheet of questions.

Language listening in the 90s

The teacher had overall control of the cassette decks (yes cassette decks) and could stop us to talk to us at any point but we as students had control of how many times we heard the recording, we could pause for thought and rewind to listen to certain points without affecting our classmates at all. 

Total autonomy and differentiation way back in the 90s.

I found this an effective and engaging way of developing my language listening skills and this continued at university. 

However, when I came into teaching in secondary schools in the late 90s, very few schools had the luxury of a purpose built language lab with all this technology. Most schools had portable cassette players that the teacher carried to class and then had to fumble around finding the right place on the tape (as they were normally shared across the department). 

The very lucky departments may have had several of these and headphones to plug in to the 6 headphone jacks. In this way groups of students could listen to different material BUT those 6 still had to listen at the same speed as the rest of their group. Not ideal!

Then something dawned on me a few weeks ago and I can believe it took that long really....

Could we recreate a similar language lab environment using edtech and G Suite for Education?

Here's my suggestion. It's not perfect by any means but it's food for thought certainly!

Click here for a demo

By using Google Slides as a base, uploading target language Youtube videos, creating questions in Google Slides or Forms and sharing to classroom you could recreate this kind of language lab experience with complete autonomy for the individual student. 

I'd be keen to know what others have done. Get in touch. 

G Suite Gems 14: 10p Mixbag #tooSuite 🤘

10p Mixbag -  these features are #tooSuite 🤘

1. Say goodbye to PDFs on websites 
Since we moved over to google sites for our school website, it has been the done thing to take policies, turn them into PDFs and then put them in a folder linked to the website with 'public' viewing rights. Easily 8 or 9 steps to get the job done.

As we've grown we've found issues with this such as multiple copies located in different places, especially when we've had to update documents following changes. It can be a real nightmare!

So how do we solve the problem and save time? Easy, we now host all our policies in the same folder but simply make them 'view only'. No need to convert to PDF and 1 step instead of 8. The added advantage is that if we need to update any documents, we simply put them in 'suggestion mode' while we make proposed changes and the outside world can't see any of what's going on behind the scenes until suggestions are accepted and suggestion mode is turned off by the editor.

2. Padlet Update
I've mentioned padlet previously but this post by Holly Clark highlights some new additional features including the ability to include video and also for people to vote now. Really handy! http://www.hollyclark.org/2018/01/31/5-reasons-to-use-padlet-tomorrow/ 

3. Gapminder Eric Curts recently promoted this via is own blog and it's got huge potential for a number of subjects including Social Sciences, Economics and Business.   https://www.gapminder.org/tools allows you to compare statistics between countries across the world at a glance in a visual way. Give it a try! 

4. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Check out Tech Republic's article on OCR to save time how-to-extract-text-from-a-pdf-or-image-in-google-drive

5. Redraft with Google dictation
Got students or colleagues redrafting documents after feedback. Have you considered getting this done using the dictation tool via the microphone icon? - Just read out the document with the changes and let Google do the work for them. 

6. Cue prompter 
Preparing for presentations or speaking & listening type activities?  Try the classic autocue approach using http://cueprompter.com/ and just press the down arrow to advance.


7. Facebook likes for Pages
Most people running pages are already aware but in case you've missed it, Facebook have made changes to reduce the amount of potential spam you see on your timeline. As a result, followers may miss your posts. To make sure they don't encourage them to click on "following" and select "see first"

8. Canva
On the subject of social media, give Canva a look if that's your thing. Canva allows for FREE, a team of 10 to collaborate online for documents including brochures, newsletters and social media posts.

9. Searching within a folder in Drive from G Suite

Google have made it easier to search for information within a specific folder in Google Drive. Now you can right click on a folder title in your Drive and select “Search within [title of folder].” Type terms into the search bar and track down your files faster. Here are some more tricks to help you save time searching.

And finally....

This absolute gem from Mr Aaron really made me smile 😃

Create a Sound Sensitive Classroom for less than £10