G Gems 30: It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

It's December 2nd and this is the first chance I've had since half-term to sit a write anything on here.  The Autumn term, as always, is a long and busy one but Christmas is homing into view and it won't be long until the days start getting longer again!

I'm very fortunate to have just returned from Vienna, having led a Support Staff Bootcamp and the Vienna International School for @Appsevents.  It was my first time in Austria for 30 years and what a beautiful city Vienna is: clean, friendly and calm. Although I flew in late on the Thursday night and flew out again late Friday night, after a very intensive full day of training with the excellent staff at the International school, it was great to be able to fit an an hour or two at the Weihnachtsmarkt in Marksplatz. One 

of the school staff, Jeremy, offered to show me around and I was able to take in some sights, buy a couple of hand crafted gifts for the family and enjoy a warming mug of Glühwein in the fresh Vienna air (-4 degrees having left London at 13 degrees). 

I really enjoy the Support Staff Bootcamps for 2 reasons: The first is that I can guarantee within any group (this week there were 19) there will be a range of ability within G Suite but that everyone is a mini-expert at something.  It may be one tiny aspect of one of the G Suite products, but from tiny acorns..... The second reason is that quite often, schools adopt G Suite for Teaching and Learning purposes and the support staff kind of have it thrust upon them. This can be daunting and occasionally resented...but once we dive into what G Suite can do, everyone comes away with some positives and beginning to think about the possibilities. 

So I'd like to thank all the staff at Vienna International School for their positivity and hospitality during my visit. Well done to the 24 teaching staff who gained their Level 1 educator certification with @BogdanCopil who ran their 2 day bootcamp alongside and thanks again to @Appsevents for the opportunity and my schools for allowing me the time. 

Here are just a few tips and tricks you might like to try:

1.  Housing documents in multiple team drives

One of my favourite aspects of Drive is the ability to use the SHIFT + Z trick to add documents to multiple folders, meaning 1 version exists in many places but everyone has access to the same live version, no copies. 

Due to the nature of Team Drives, this isn't an obvious option, in fact, many think it's not possible - but it is! 

Watch here for my workaround solution 

2. Qlearly - organise your tab windows for different purposes

This new kid on the block is a handy way to organise your tabs for different purposes - it comes with a template of ideas which you can edit as you see fit.  Have a board set up with sections for each class, or each role and save the commonly used sites for that purpose in each to open quickly and easily at the touch of a single button. 

I can see Qlearly now the rain has gone

3. Mac users - upgrade to Mojave

The latest version of ios for macs allows screen recording and screen shooting with annotation as standard using CMD + SHIFT + 5

Mojave screen recording

And finally

My students current favourite thing in feedback...

Using Google Keep to provide animated GIF feedback in slides and docs.

Save your favourite GIFS to keep and in slides or docs, just pull those gifs into the docs to give students engaging feedback.

I've noticed increased improvement rates in student work as they're keen to see what the next GIF will be.

G Gems 27: Optional extras 👨‍🏫

Add bitmojis to your docs and emails with the bitmoji chrome extension. It's really simple.  

Personally, I love a bitmoji as it grabs attention quickly and also makes docs more interesting. The range of different images is great once you've customised your own bitmoji and a quick copy and paste will insert your chosen graphic into your docs.  The chrome extension also talks to your gmail and gives you a bitmoji icon in compose for you add an image if you want to.

Add emojis to document names, folder names or bookmarks


Are you often left wondering if you've chosen the right emoji?
Check out https://emojitranslate.com/ where you can enter text and have it translated into an appropriate emoji. Then just copy and paste anywhere you like.  Add it to a document name, folder name or bookmark to customise your files. 

Are you using a team drive?
A colleague recently wanted his department team drive to contain a link to a resource website that was pulling together files from various different places. He wasn't keen on having everyone add the website to their bookmarks as he wanted his team drive to be a "one stop shop" for everything.

We came up with a simple solution using Google Drawings. We created a simple image, included the link as a hyperlink and then save the image as a pdf in the team drive for everyone to access. Now all they have to do is click on the link.

Here's an example that works a bit like your own version of symbaloo: Department weblinks

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!