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!)