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!