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 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