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 Suite Gems 22: lettuce have a look at some little gems

Lettuce have a look at some little gems 

One Tab

If you're one of those people who ends up leaving all your windows open, One Tab extension might be right up your street.

One Tab gathers and lists your open tabs

Just one click will pile all your open tabs into a drop down list on the left of your screen. 

Pick from the list or click restore at any point to put them all back.




Extensity

This is one for those of us with lots of extensions on our toolbars.

Add Extensity to chrome and you will be able to quickly put all your extensions into a drop down and toggle them on/off as required. Really handy when you're short of space and it enables you to select just the tools likely for the job in hand. 






Turn off the lights


Turn off the lights allows you to dim to black with Youtube videos. This does what it says, it dims all the surrounding content allowing you to focus on the video content without going full screen. I showed this to my Year 11 students and they liked the idea of dimming out distracting cat videos...well some did!

And finally...

Try the Momentum extension to help you refocus during a busy day and take care of yourself. Handy for to do lists, inspirational quotes, relaxing images and welcome reminders about what you want to achieve every time you open a new tab

G Suite Gems 21: Spring at last?

We've hopefully seen the last of any Beasts from the East, but as the new shoots of Spring begin to show, now's a great time to change your way of thinking and doing.

Slow it down with Youtube

click here to watch the video

For MFL teachers, YouTube can provide us with a wealth of 
authentic materials including news videos, films and TV shows such as the legendary telenovelas. 

Use the settings > speed controls on any video to slow down the speed of speech and help your students manage their listening. This allows for complete differentiation as each student can play at the speed of their choice. 


New Google Sites - add your custom favicon
New google sites now gives you the option to upload your own favicon to sit it bookmark bars. 




It's easy to do, in edit mode, just click on the 3 dots (traffic lights) and select add/edit favicon and away you go. 




Are you GDPR ready?  
with May 25 fast approaching, I'm sure many of us are busy ensuring our systems and processes will be compliant with the new regulations.

These new regulations, the first in 20 years, will help us safeguard our personal data and that of others. In many cases, some changes to working practices will be needed which may either be greeted with excitement or worry.

Here are some of my tips for helping staff and students prepare not just for GDPR, but also for life in the cloud moving forward:

DO operate a clear desk policy
DO share documents wherever possible via Google Drive
DO store documents wherever possible on Google Drive
DO ensure that permissions are correctly set on any documents stored and shared via Google Drive.
DO ensure that all devices are password protected, and where applicable use 2-step authentication
DO log out of your computer/laptop/device every time you leave it unattended
DO ensure that all hard copies of personal data are stored securely, double locked and accessed only by authorised individuals and subsequently destroyed correctly.

DO NOT use USBs/Pen drives to transfer personal or sensitive data.
DO NOT download/store data on desktops or personal devices or remove it from the premises.
DO NOT download files and documents from unverified or untrusted sources.
DO NOT post personal or sensitive data in work spaces
DO NOT print personal or sensitive data when you can share via Google Drive

DO NOT save passwords - select NEVER if prompted.

The ICO also has a variety of resources available to act a reminders for people about correct practice. The key moving forward is to build data protection by design into your planning, prior to establishing any new process.

And finally...

a reminder that we don't have to be design experts - use the Explore function to create engaging slide designs in Slides without any fuss.

Watch here to find out how

G Suite Gems 18: Don't Do It Yourself (with videos)

Don't Do It Yourself!

1. Explore for great slide design
 If you don't like the designs offered to you as standard in Slides, use the Explore option to create some more for you

2. Creating easy organisational charts in Google Sheets 
Avoid spending ages fiddling around with layouts and updating when staff or structures change.

3. Add an automatic table of contents in Google Docs
It's like actual magic!

 4. Fake sites for evaluating with students
Check out these great AND CURRENT sites for teaching students about evaluating web sources - originally shared by Eric Curts   Fake sites - hours saved searching for or even creating suitable resources. I particularly like this one, sounds very dangerous!

5. Make the students think

I love this kind of approach to thinking and they make great starters or points for discussion around learning. Here's an example, I can't remember where I came across this but show this to your students and see what THEY can tell YOU about what it is telling us. Enjoy!

what patterns can you see? It's a great way to represent familiar material in unfamiliar ways to boost independent thinking.

I've recently set up a Youtube Channel. 

I'm always open to feedback and suggestions so please feel free to drop me a message.

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 15: whatever happened to the language lab?

Whatever happened to the language lab?

As a language teacher (amongst other things), I often hark back to when I was at 6th form, studying French, German and Spanish, using what seemed like incredible technology.

For those who don't have the luxury of remembering that far back, there we'd all sit, around 25 of us in a language lab with our individual booths and headphones. The teacher had readied a recording for us to listen to and around came a worksheet of questions.

Language listening in the 90s

The teacher had overall control of the cassette decks (yes cassette decks) and could stop us to talk to us at any point but we as students had control of how many times we heard the recording, we could pause for thought and rewind to listen to certain points without affecting our classmates at all. 

Total autonomy and differentiation way back in the 90s.

I found this an effective and engaging way of developing my language listening skills and this continued at university. 

However, when I came into teaching in secondary schools in the late 90s, very few schools had the luxury of a purpose built language lab with all this technology. Most schools had portable cassette players that the teacher carried to class and then had to fumble around finding the right place on the tape (as they were normally shared across the department). 

The very lucky departments may have had several of these and headphones to plug in to the 6 headphone jacks. In this way groups of students could listen to different material BUT those 6 still had to listen at the same speed as the rest of their group. Not ideal!

Then something dawned on me a few weeks ago and I can believe it took that long really....

Could we recreate a similar language lab environment using edtech and G Suite for Education?

Here's my suggestion. It's not perfect by any means but it's food for thought certainly!

Click here for a demo

By using Google Slides as a base, uploading target language Youtube videos, creating questions in Google Slides or Forms and sharing to classroom you could recreate this kind of language lab experience with complete autonomy for the individual student. 

I'd be keen to know what others have done. Get in touch. 

G Suite Gems 10: Slides, Video, Finding Files and Archiving

InsertingVideo 📼 and Finding Files 🔎 and Archiving 📙

Add a touch of class to your videos in Slides...
Long gone are the days of messing around with copying links and struggling to embed videos into a slide deck.

Start typing key words, paste in the URL if known or search your videos in Drive

Slides offers you the perfect solution with it's updated INSERT>VIDEO option that allows you to add a video directly from Youtube by search, URL or from your Google Drive.

That's a HUGE time saver in itself but how about upping the ante?

By inserting an image of a TV or cinema screen on to your slide, you can insert, overlay the video and resize to fit the TV screen. Then select Video Options to choose auto-play or mute audio options.

Size the inserted video accordingly and choose auto-play on the right or mute audio. You can even choose a start/end point.

Check out this example Slide deck with inserted video on cinema screen   and give it a go for yourself! 

I recently used this with some Year 7 students who were putting together revision slides for Spanish. They loved the idea and alongside the chosen images of things like numbers and time they added videos that auto-played as they read the words, allowing them to match spelling to sound. They said it was "much better than just going through old stuff". Praise indeed for this great feature!!

Finding files in Drive - HELP ME! they cry.
As colleagues and friends are using G Suite more and more they are finding their Drives becoming busier and busier. In many cases, they spend time opening folders and documents hoping to find what they're looking for because they aren't using the full power of the search facility. Check out this video to explore the advance search options you might not be aware of. We've all been there but this might change the way you organise your drive from now on.

Click here to watch the video



And finally...

Are you still archiving old versions of documents into a 2017 archive folder and creating new ones called "New" or "Current" or "2018 version"?




A lot of people are, but there really is no need to be doing this when all you need do is name the
version in Version History.

By choosing to name your versions appropriately you can easily revert to a previous set up, review a previous version and maintain any comments or suggestions in one place, rather than having several copies of a similar document clogging up folders unnecessarily.  Personally, I'd suggest a version naming protocol but this may be different depending on the needs/purpose of the document. 

This is equally useful for keeping track of the writing process from first draft to final piece. Remember, wherever you see the traffic lights (3 grey dots) there's a feature waiting to be discovered!