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 Gems 24: Sliding into your inbox - more awesome updates for Slides

Insert slides into docs
Did you know you can now insert a slide deck into a google doc? Well you can, great for programmes, staff handbooks etc as you can select a slide to insert and choose whether it remains linked to the presentation or not. Not only is this handy, it's also a lot more visually appealing than an ugly hyperlink.

Rulers and guides in slides 

add as many guides as you like in 'view'

I've been waiting for this for what seems like an age but it's finally here. Just go to view in the menu and select ruler or guides to get those all important measurements and guidelines that help line everything up beautifully. You can add any number of guides and move them around to suit your needs too. 

Check mark now in slides
I'm a huge fan of checkmark, especially since it became customisable, allowing you to create your own categories, (I turned mine into target language for MFL in docs), but hearing it's now available in slides too is very welcome news and another great step in reducing teacher marking workload. Having tried it out, it seems it might still be a bit 'buggy' as it will insert a comment box but not automate the comment currently (unless that's just me).

Group shapes in Slides 
If you use Slides to create images, flowcharts or diagrams, the ability to group all objects together as one is a life saver. Watch a quick how to below:

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!