December 2020 – Craig M Sheil

Day 10 of Google 2020 – Google Meet & Simulator

We have made to it Day 10. I truly enjoy doing this each year. There is so much information out there. Lots of changes. My hope is that you were able to take some new knowledge back with you over the past two weeks from these bit sized learning opportunities.

GOOGLE MEETS

Our district decided to go the route of Google Meets for all remote instruction. Meets sure has seen big changes over the past few months. While there is still room for improvement, teachers over all in our district has been happy with the enhancements that have been added.

Just this week, Google announced that they are adding Captions for languages beyond English. Students will have the ability to turn on captions under the settings gear of their Google Meet. There is also indication that once a setting is set, it will remember the language that was chosen. This is a user setting, so a teacher cannot force this on the student.

Day 9 of Google 2020 – Chrome

On Day 9 of Google 2020, we will take a look a some good to know Chrome tips/websites.

CHROME EXTENSIONS

There have been a couple situations where both students and teachers have indicated that they could not find an extension that the district has pushed out to all users. The extension was there but the user did not pin the extension to show up.

On the reverse side, some staff find that they have to many extensions or they might not use all that have been forced to their profile. The user can unpin extensions so that they don’t show up all of the time.

The 1.5 minute video below will walk through the process of pinning/unpinning an extension. You might have noticed there is now a puzzle piece that showed up on the top right corner. That is where you go to pin/unpin.

Day 8 of Google 2020 – Google Slides (Part 2)

On Day 8, we look back at Google Slides. You might be saying to yourself, hey Craig, aren’t you cheating right now going back to Slides? One could say yes, but there was just so much with Slides that I felt it made more sense to break it up into two days. Hope you find at least one of the tips useful to put into your practice.

SHORTCUT KEYS

For those of you who have read my blog posts before, you know that I am big on short cut key to help streamline my workflow. The three below can be helpful for those of you who find yourself working with slides or drawings a lot. They work with both tools.

Duplicating

Prior to June 2020, anytime that I wanted to duplicate an object, a text box, an image, words, etc…I would use the following keystrokes.

Command + C (on mac) or Control + C (Chromebook) so that I could copy what I want a duplicate of. Then I would select Command + V (on mac) or Control + V (Chromebook) to paste the item that I want a duplicate of. Well, it was brought to my attention that that shortcut was not a shortcut.

Instead, the shortcut is to select the item I want a duplicate of and then select Command + D (mac) or Control + D (Chromebook). This will right away duplicate the item I selected and make a copy of it. You can do this as many times as needed. AMAZING. Try it! You won’t waste that precious extra second again with copy and paste when duplicating in Google Slides or Google Drawings.

Day 7 of Google 2020 – Gmail

Today, for Day 7 of Google 2020, we will take a deeper look with Gmail. Oh who doesn’t like a good ol’ email? We live in email every day. Do you find yourself using the tool as effectively as possible? Here are some tips to consider.

RIGHT SIDE CHAT

The default with Gmail is having chat appear on the bottom left corner of your email. I honestly don’t find that helpful, I need more space then what is provided on the bottom. If you click on the settings gear on the top right corner, followed by the advanced menu, you will see that you can turn on right side chat. The 19 second video below (no sound) will walk you through the steps.

Day 6 of Google 2020 – YouTube Studio

On the sixth day of Google 2020, we will take a look at YouTube Studio. I will have to admit, back in the day, I was one to promote teachers to upload their content to YouTube. Then with the ease of videos of being shared via Google Drive, I found myself encouraging staff to go that route. It was one less thing to have to worry about or stress about.

Just this week, I revisited my school YouTube channel and was surprised with some of the features that YouTube Studio now has. I also decided to share a reminder about creating playlists. Hope these tips can help you out.

YOUTUBE CHAPTERS

I think I am MOST excited about this feature. To be honest, I am not sure how long this feature has been available and I just didn’t know about it. The owner of the YouTube video has the ability to create chapters. Why would this be important?

Well, both students and teachers are finding themselves being consumers of videos for learning or reinforcement of learning. Many teachers are finding themselves creating short tutorials or screencasts. If teachers decide to upload their video to their school YouTube channel they can determine when to create different chapters in the video. Consumers of the video now have an opportunity to either watch the whole video from start to finish or determine where in the video they want to spend their time based on the chapter titles. Does this take an extra step? Sure. Is this mandatory? No. Are you not supporting your students if you don’t use this feature? No. Do I think it is clever? Sure.

The short video below will walk you through the process.