G Gems 28: What a difference a year makes! Let's head to Bootcamp.

So just a year ago I attended the Google for Education Back to School Summit in London which was being hosted by my good friend and former colleague/student Dean Stokes for Appsevents. This was my first visit to Google and quite an eye opener as we played around with Jamboards and sat on inflatable pink flamingos for a coffee and a chat. It was a very inspiring day and prompted me to get more involved. 

Within a month, a October half-term 2017 I set aside a day to complete my Certified Educator Level 1 exam and passed, so did Level 2 the following day. I passed again and was feeling really pleased with myself. 

Fast forward to January and I was asked to lead some Google training, not for teaching staff but for Educational Support Staff in my schools. As the unsung heroes and the glue that keeps schools together, I wanted to make sure I got the right notes and the team came away with something to actually use in their every day work lives. The feedback was positive: Mission Accomplished. 

In July I was asked to run some CPD for a local primary school with teachers and but for a few WiFi issues, that went well too. At the same time I was constantly chatting withy wife, who is a Finance Assistant in a secondary school, about her workload and balance. I've tried to get her using more G Suite but it's a but to be fair, when she gets home she wants to relax, not launch into training mode, even though we both know I can help: Work in progress.

At the end of July 2018 I completed my Certified Trainer application and was successful so set about planning my 12 sessions for the year. With day 1 of the Autumn term in the calendar already for LSAs I devised and ran a short digital escape room designed to raise their awareness of Google Forms and Classroom. That went well too so I offered to run a term long in house CPD pathway on G Suite for staff which begins next week. It begins next week as the original date has to be postponed following a text from Dean Stokes asking if I could make it to Scotland this weekend to help out with an Appsevents bootcamp for Support Staff. I got the nod from my bosses and booked my flights and hotel.

My first day delivering a bootcamp - Robert Gordon's College, Aberdeen

Yesterday was that day as I delivered my first full day Support Staff Bootcamp at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen. What an amazing building to work in on my first visit north of the border!

After a hearty breakfast in the hotel, including haggis and tattie scones, Dean, Ben Rouse and I headed off to set up.

The group of 6 support staff I was working with were all in different roles and confessed to different levels of confidence and frustration but they were awesome and very positive throughout. (Always appreciated on your first one, so thanks folks!)

We had a packed day and it was awesome to see faces light up and "You mean, I can just do that...?" flying around the room.

As I explained to the group, my view is that support staff in schools using G Suite often get the tools thrust upon them because it's been brought in for teaching and learning. Often they are self taught and know what they know, which can be limited so it was great to dive deeper into Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slide, Sites and more with them. When the day finished everyone was really appreciative and full of ideas so I'm happy.

This massive part of the educational work force is often massively under appreciated and that's why I've created a Facebook group for Support Staff using G Suite.

If you have support staff in your school that would like to see hints, tips and share best practice, please invite them to join.

Also look out for #googleESS on social media 

Sharing is important but more importantly in this day and age, G Suite can change your world.

As I said to Ben and some of the group afterwards, I'm not selling anything except a better work-life balance. What's not to like? 

Thanks to Dean, Ben, Appsevents, everyone who took part in the day and also my schools for allowing me the time! 

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