G Gems 33: Away from the day job - how G Suite helped transform a community project

Away from the day job: A story about how G Suite helped transform a community project.

Aside from being a teacher for 20 years, some of you may be aware that I'm a keen sportsman too. I've played football and cricket for many years and took up field hockey around 6 years ago, having never played before.  It's a great game and I was quick to immerse myself in the clubhouse culture just as much as on the pitch. With myself, my wife and my daughter all playing - it's like a home away from home at times and we've made great friends.

It was at the end of my first season at Witham Hockey Club that I was told about our annual Witham Beer Festival. As people explained about the event and how it was started to help raise money to maintain our clubhouse building I was impressed and excited.   I love a good ale and I was really looking forward to coming along.

That was year 3 of the festival and our volunteer organisers from the hockey club and Witham Cricket Club had done a great job of sourcing tents and marquees, a range of around 30 beers and a few wines local to East Anglia.  While some volunteers served the beer. others ran the BBQ and more played in cricket matches to entertain the visitors.  

It was really good fun, we have around 500 visitors and raised some much needed funds so I decided to get more involved in Year 4.

Year 4 I went along to my first beer festival committee meeting and it was packed.  There was a terrific range of experience and ideas but it was hard to keep everyone informed of what we were trying to achieve and where everyone was at. It was after this meeting that I spoke to our chairman and mentioned Google Drive. We'd been using it a school for around a year really effectively, thanks largely to the drive of our then Learning Technologies Manager, Dean Stokes (you might have heard of him). 

The chairman Lee and I spoke and I showed him G Suite's capabilities and a plan was formed to "Go Google".  With an 'experienced' committee we knew there would be some resistance/ scepticism but we also knew it would take the beer festival forward.

We designed a created a 'matrix' of job roles and tasks on google sheets to project manage the whole things, set up a messaging protocol so that we didn't need to rely on long-winded meetings every month and gave everyone the trust and time to get on with their jobs.

We began using google slides and drawings to create advertising posts for social media, we used sites to redevelop the website and docs to create our programme. We kept all our documentation in Drive, with access to those who needed it and did away with reams of paper. We also used forms for volunteer sign up and feedback on the festival.

Overall, the first year was challenging but the committee embraced the new methods (with a bit of training and support from yours truly) and we are now heading towards our 9th festival from 22-22 August 2019.

Things grew rapidly, even the marquee! (2013 -2017)

The festival has grown massively in popularity and size since those days and it would not have been possible without using G Suite and the support of our partners, especially Paul from Harwich Town Brewing Company. We now welcome over 2000 visitors to the event, have a range over over 100 beers, ciders and wines, have live cricket and music as well as professional caterers. This year, using Glide and google sheets, we'll also have our own App 

It has become one of the most popular community events in town, supported greatly by sponsorship of barrels by local businesses and people.

If you're in Essex over August Bank Holiday, why not pop in for a pint?

www.withambeerfestival.co.uk

G Suite Gems 20: getting better and better

In a week where I've seen people yet again encouraging people to move away from Google because of "security" alongside the standard "I've been trying for ages but I just can't get on with google" my sense of humour has had a real test! 

Dispel the myths and read for yourself here Google For Education and GDPR and here Privacy & Security 

So with that cleared up, let's embrace the world of G Suite and see what's new:

Slides - users with portable IOS devices will now find they have a draw option when presenting a slide deck on screen. This means you (or your students) can now write directly on a slide to annotate, comment or highlight key areas. This could be a real game changer for many in the classroom, especially maths, science and MFL teachers where you can now free write symbols, equations and special characters without needing to insert. 

New Google Sites - a welcome update: users of new google sites can now upload their own favicon (that's the little guy who appears in a browser tab or in your bookmark bar). This can help your site visitors more easily recognise your site, and help you build your brand.

Upload a favicon 

Google Docs Menu update - one of the things I love about G Suite is how things are constantly changing and that's down to the feedback submitted AND the fact that Google actually listen to it. 

I'm loving the update to Docs menu that has separated out text and highlight into their own boxes. I've lost count of the number of times I've highlighted when I meant to change font colour or vice versa but no more! 

Google Drive searching - searching in Drive is so simple but I know many people still spend ages scrolling through trying to find a file rather than heading straight to it. The update to drive to allow you to see the 4 most recent files as Quick Access was an excellent addition and now comes another: 


The “Shared with Me” section shows the files that have been shared with you by another owner (searching by owner is a great way to find docs by the way) but the lovely people at Google are going to start organising this section for you so you may also see people listed, along with files they’ve shared with you. Simply click on a document to quickly open it. 

Check out google's blogspot here
And finally... it's now less that a week to the @Appsevents Google Summit in Wembley. I'll be heading along for day 3 and looking forward to catching up with friends but I'm also really pleased to see support staff bootcamps running on the Friday. In my opinion, a school's support staff are key to getting the whole organisation to embrace collaboration through GforE. When these unsung heroes understand how they can work more efficiently within their own teams and beyond,  and champion this, the rest of the staff will have to get on board. 

If you're a member of school support staff, get along to one of these bootcamps and save yourselves a whole heap of work in the long run.

G Suite Gems 11: Change your way of thinking

Change your way of thinking: 

Using Slides where you might once have used Word or Publisher 

Explore the potential of Slides

When you've worked in a particular way for a substantial amount of time it can be easy to get stuck in a fixed mindset and way of working. When I first started using G Suite my first summary was  pretty much "Docs is Word, Sheets is Excel and Slides is Powerpoint but you can share and you don't have to save".

In the most part people took that on board and because everyone is always busy, not everyone had time to explore new or different features. So for a couple of years people, myself included, bemoaned the issues of bringing a previous 'handbook' or 'guide' created in Word across to Drive, opening as a Google Doc and then finding the formatting messed up. For some, it was too frustrating and they reverted back to the familiar Word format, others persevered making the necessary readjustments and a few explored other options. It was here that the breakthrough came.

No-one had ever envisaged making a booklet using Slides, possibly because they thought page set up was only available in landscape. Well, with custom page set ups, anything is possible. Not only can you easily position titles, text boxes and images but you can very easily add video with the updated Insert functions of Slides. Add to that the ability to link slides together you can easily create a document that can be easily navigated online. 

We all know that teaching methods in maths have changed a lot over the years and as a parent myself, sometimes I struggled to know the best way to help my daughter. 

Here's an example of a document I put together for my school with the help of resources from the excellent corbettmaths.com to help parents/carers support their child's learning/homework in maths.

Supporting your child in mathematics - take a look at this video based resource.

We're also now working on the use of Slides for a Student's Guide to the Academy for our new intake in September 2018.

The other advantage is of course that a document created in Slides can be published to the web and placed on your website with auto-play and auto-advance settings to play as a scrolling video.

Oh and why not use Google Drawings to create adverts, posters and logos?

It's far more accessible than you might think! 

G Suite Gem 6

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄Who's ready for a Christmas Party ?🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

Let's start at the Office.

Be Awesome this Christmas and use Office Documents in Drive!

I work with a number of people who are very used to and comfortable with Microsoft Office and have a large number of historic files that they want to keep using without converting them to Google Docs, sheets or slides. This is often due to concerns that some formatting might be affected.

These guys were very grateful to hear about Awesome Drive from aodocs.com and have gone away to give it a try. Essentially, this clever extension allows you to create, edit and save Office files within Google Drive. Great hey? 

Here's a short video from EdTech Tutorials to show you how it works. Enjoy! 

Teach yourself about Script Editor

Prior to visiting the Appsevents Google Summit for Education in October, I had never written any sort of code or script. As I swapped workshop midway (which was encouraged) I was fortunate to find the excellent Oli Trussell just finishing up with instructions and letting everyone try appscripting for themselves. Massive Faux pas on my part! However, just a short conversation with Oli and a further look at the resources from the day in my own time got me interested. 

That was October.  

Fast forward to December and I've finally found some time to do some research and have successfully written a code to embed Twitter into one of my Google Sites (only to find the feature was added anyway 2 days later 🤣🤣🤣) and also learnt to code a pop up message to show on opening a document using HTML and Script Editor. Check out https://www.w3schools.com/ and click on the try it yourself to learn for yourself. 

Attaching emails in Gmail 

A friend of mine uses Gmail at work but has been frustrated an when he used Outlook he could always attach an email another email for referencing or providing context. He asked me to see if it could be done in Gmail and the answer is YES!. 

Follow the steps here to attach an email to another email message in Gmail or 

(watch this video from Bettercloud) 

The great news for me is that it also work with Inbox for Gmail, which personally, I L💙VE. (Another thanks due to Oli T for introducing me to this extension - I've never had such an organised and empty inbox!)