Ode to Google Drive

I just started using Google Drive last year, and it was my first realization that I'm not a young teacher anymore! I learned the ins and outs of how to navigate Google docs and slides from some 20-something teachers in my master's cohort. After just one collaborative project, I knew this was an amazing tool.  I shared it with my coworkers, and we began discussing moving from using OneNote to Google Docs and shared folders through Drive to organize our shared files.  I quickly saw the benefit of being able to share, collaborate, and access our files from anywhere and any device. What a powerful tool!

How do I love Google Drive?
Let me count the ways...

1. Collaborative Ability: Within Google Drive, or in their own separate apps, you can create documents (Google Docs), spreadsheets (Google Sheets), slide presentations (Google Slides), and drawings (Google Drawings).  All of these applications are easy to use because they are similar to their equivalents in Microsoft Office.  Where Google comes out on top is the ability to work collaboratively in real time on a project. This is extremely useful among coworkers, with students, or even parents! See how it works...

2. Automatic Saving: Need I say more?  Actually, I do! Not only do Google apps save automatically (no more oops-forgot-to-saves!), but you can also view all of the revision history, and feel like a time traveler!  Instructions here.

3. Google Forms for Quizzes: Kids love tech. I love formative assessments. I hate taking the time to grade. This is the answer!  I can quickly have students take a quiz, and immediately I have results. I can use those results as a formative assessment to help me plan my lessons, or I can use them at the end of a unit for summative data.

This shows me, at a glance, how my students did on this assessment, and what the most missed questions were. I can see from this specific quiz that I need to reteach text structure. I can also see individual student results and response data for each question. 

I like to show the students the results of each question right after the test, to give them immediate feedback, and we can then go directly into a re-teaching lesson from there if needed. 

4. Extensions: Google's extensions work great with the apps within Google Drive. As I type this on Blogger, the Grammarly extension is hard at work helping me banish extra commas and correct spelling errors.  Click here for more.

5. Accessibility: I can access and use my Google Drive on my iPad, iPhone, laptop, or school desktop.  Because all of the information is cloud-based, I can access it from anywhere on any device! I can also store non-Google files within my Google Drive. I have pictures, music, videos, Word documents, pdfs and many other files stored in there. This makes planning my lessons from home easier than ever! 

Google Drive Essential Training (2015) by Jess Stratton

As you can see, I'm really excited about all of the possibilities that Google provides for me as an eductor, and for my students. I'm starting to look into Google Classroom, but haven't jumped that hurdle yet. Now that I have dipped my toe into the Google waters and found it to be very welcoming, I just might have to dive right in!

From Cult of Pedagogy

Google Search and Gmail Tips

Hello again, friends! I'm taking advantage of a long weekend, and getting a head start on my Google class work.  It's really a lot of fun, so once I start, it's hard to stop!  Here are some things I've learned to help with Google searches and with Gmail.

Google Search tips: When searching for a topic on Google, it's important to find exactly what you are looking for. Using quotation marks around your search helps with that. For example, if I'm doing an animal report on Florida panthers, I would want to type it in like this: "Florida panthers".  This way, I don't just get information about Florida or all panthers. Additionally, if I do this search, I'm going to get a lot of hits about the NHL team.  If I'm doing an animal report, this is not helpful.  So, I would type -NHL -hockey after my search term. My search might look like this:

This will give me information on the animal, and not the team or shopping sites selling fan gear.

This all works great if I'm doing a search on my own, but my fourth graders would be a little more distracted by the extra "stuff" and have a hard time remembering to use quotation marks and dashes.  So, I set up a custom search engine for them to use when researching for their endangered animal reports. Not only does it take away all of the sites that aren't about the animal they are researching, but it also keeps them from going to personal blogs, inappropriate sites, and that dreaded Wikipedia. Fourth grade is not too early to teach them that Wikipedia is not the most reliable site to use for research. To set up a search engine, view this tutorial. 

If you'd like to try one out, check out mine that I will use with my students. Feel free to search for any animal of your choosing right from this search bar. Really... try it!



Gmail: I have been using Gmail for about six years now.  It is constantly improving.  I've learned a few tricks along the way, and I feel like sharing!

Tip 1: Organize your inbox

This tip has saved me from having an overly-crowded inbox, and helps me see the most important messages, while also allowing me to easily delete the excess.  You can choose which of the five tabs are most useful to you. I chose all of them because I love categorizing!  There are two ways to do this. You can go into settings (the gear shaped icon on the top right) and choose "configure inbox", or you can click on the small plus sign to the very right of the tabs. Either way, you will come to this pop-up.

In this pop-up, you can choose from 1 to 5 of the tabs to enable, and this will help keep your inbox nice and organized!

Tip 2: Unsubscribe
Now that you have a nicely organized inbox, you can get to work unsubscribing from many of those subscriptions, ads, and updates that you don't ever read anyway.  Many of these emails have the option to unsubscribe right in the email itself. This works, but can be time consuming if you have an over-abundance of junk emails. Unroll.me allows you to unsubscribe from many subscriptions at once, and also gives you the option to do a "rollup" where the junk email that you might want to keep (store coupons, for example) all gets rolled together into one daily email.  Here's how (you can turn down the speakers on this one):

Tip 3: Undo Send

This one is very useful when you accidentally hit "reply all" or send to the wrong contact altogether. Whoops! We've all been there. If you go to settings, under "general", you can choose to enable the undo send feature.  DO THIS. Once it's enabled, you have the ability to undo a sent email within 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds (you choose the time when you enable it). Here's how it looks in action:

Simple, huh? Think of the all embarrassment this could save!

I hope these tips have been helpful. View this training guide for more tips and tricks for Gmail!

And... Happy 88th Birthday to Martin Luther King, Jr!

Here I am, world!

Good afternoon, everyone! ♫ Good afternoon, Mrs. Holtorf! ♪♪

On this, the first day of my professional blog, I am at home enjoying a lazy severe weather day with my family.  A very lucky Friday the 13th, if you ask me.  With the full moon, icy weather, and unlucky date, it could have been a crazy day with my fourth graders! Let's hope that the incoming storm won't be as bad as the experts are predicting.

I am a little over halfway through my master's program at Baker University, and right now I am taking a class called "Google Tools for Educators."  I'm less than a week in, but already loving a lot of the tools that were right there all along, but I didn't know enough about.  In these first few blog posts, I'm going to touch on a few.

Google Chrome: Seriously, WHY have I not been using this browser? I've had it on my computer, but almost exclusively used Firefox.  Chrome is very user-friendly, and with the apps and extensions, I feel like I just received a brand new tech device. I'm enjoying searching the web store for more familiar and new apps.  I love some of the great features of Chrome like the ability to sync up some of my already bookmarked sites from other browsers, quick access to my gmail, and the fact that all of my favorite apps are in one place, accessible from any device using my Google account. And, of course, there is the ability to download a theme that you love.  

 How cute is BB-8?

Google Apps and Extensions: Along with the fun themes, and the great LOOK of Chrome, what I find most awesome are the multitude of apps and extensions that you can download.  How have I lived without these for so long?  In the screenshot above, you can see the apps I have visible on my first page. I have a few more on the next page, as well. I'm just starting to learn about it, but TES Teach with Blendspace is going to be a go-to app for compiling my daily lessons for reading. Often, I have many windows open on my computer with a video, power point, SMART lesson, Kahoot, etc.  This app puts them all together on one page, so I can just click on each section, and save it all as one lesson. 

This is a lesson I started on pronouns with a video hook, a printable poster, my pronoun lesson file, and a few other resources. All in one place!

Another new app I will start using more often is Lucidpress. I have used Microsoft Publisher in the past for making class newsletters, fliers, invitations, etc. I was looking for something similar through Google because I like the way you can collaborate on Google Docs, Slides, and so forth.  Lucidpress allows for collaboration, so my teammates and I can each add in what we are teaching in our own classes at the same time. I love time savers!

Extensions are different than apps, in that extensions just help within your apps. For instance, I used the Nimbus extension to take and annotate these screenshots.  It's like the snip it tool that I have used for years, but even better!  It makes snipping so easy. I can just snip a small section, the whole page, just what's showing on the screen, or even scroll and snip! I've already used it quite a few times, and it's only been a few days! Another extension I like is Tab Resize. I often have multiple windows open, and like to use the screen split feature. This takes it to a whole new level. I can split my screen vertically, horizontally, or in fourths!  

This makes my multi-tasking heart happy!

Google+: I'll be honest here. I've known about Google+ for a very long time.  Since it's beta version, actually. At the beginning, I thought it's purpose was most similar to Facebook. What I have learned in the past few days of perusing Google+, is that it has many purposes. One is to gather ideas through "Collections" from others who have posted on specific topics (think Pinterest). Another is to join discussion and sharing groups called "Communities" (think Facebook groups). A third is to make connections with people and add them to your "Circles". This part is similar to Facebook, in that you can share pictures, posts, etc, but you can choose which circles you share with. You can have a circle for family, for friends, for coworkers, for a weight loss group...  Circles are also similar to Twitter, because you can follow people without them following you, and vice versa.  Google+ has come a long way since it's start, so I'm going to give it another go.  

I'm really liking what I'm seeing so far with Google.  It's pretty fun to play around with it, but to be honest, I love playing with new toys!  If you don't have Google Chrome installed on your computer, you can do it here. 

Below is a video that our instructor shared with us, and it has great tips.  Enjoy!