Tech Tip Tuesday: Helping Students Manage School with My Study Life

Students have a lot going on in their lives and keeping track of it all is a skill in and of itself. So what if there was a tool to help them better manage their daily school lives? My Study Life is an app that can be accessed via the web, on their phones via the app, or through an extension in the Chrome Web Browser. With the onset of the holiday season and winter break shortly upon us, now is a good time to introduce this program to your students and help them get (re)organized and maintain that organization for the stretch run.

This program offers kids a “digital” planner, where they can set up their classes, and manage tasks/exams/quizzes/projects, etc. It is easily adaptable to ANY school schedule (you can introduce it to your own kids), and even if you access it in one place (on your iPhone), you can get to it in Chrome. Whats great- is students have this planner with them at all times. They just have to be taught how to BEST utilize it and get it up and running.

Check it out, then introduce it to your students. If you have any questions- feel free to reach out to me!

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Tech Tip Tuesday: Spice Up Your Schoology Materials with Images and Animated Gifs

There is a lot of leeway in Schoology to be creative and personalize the look and feel of your courses, folders, assignments, and materials. One way to really enhance the overall feel of it is to embed images and animated gifs (animated/moving images) within your materials. Take a look at a few examples of things I have done in the past:

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Here’s how you can do this with your courses:

1. To add images to folders/assignments/materials: Click to edit the material itself using the “gear icon” –> click the “insert content” button –> “image” –> “upload image” –> “Attach file”. NOTE: I find it quite easier to download the image you want beforehand. This way you can edit/crop/manage the photo prior to uploading it. Once you do this, the image will be embedded within the material you selected. Click on the image, and click the “image icon”. In the box that opens, you can edit the image dimensions, or add a border/frame. Enter a “1” or “2” into the border box to see a border appear around the image. I’m a fan of “2” here.
2. To add animated images to folders/assignments/materials: Find the animated image you’d like to embed online. You can do a Google Search for the image followed by the words “animated gif” and this will usually bring up something that you are looking for or similar. Once you find the image you want, right-click on the image and select “copy image address”. Now, go to your Schoology course and click to edit the material you want to add the animated gif to using the “gear icon” –> click the “insert content” button –> “image” –> “From the web” –> then paste the link we copied from the image into the “Link” box and click “insert media”. Just like above, you can then edit the animated gif dimensions or add a border if so you choose.

Hope this helps!

Tech Tip Tuesday: Make Your Spreadsheets AWESOME

Are you looking to spruce up your tables/spreadsheets and a better way to display the content? Check out Awesome Table. Awesome Table is a free web program/app that takes information in a Google Sheet, and displays it in a variety of new ways. You can take your information and instead of boring cells, show the data/information off in a card view, maps, images, etc.

So what if you used Awesome Table . . .

• to display SGO content in a visually impactive way
• to create a student, club, team, personnel directory
• to create a video gallery of student created videos
• to create an image gallery . . .
• to get students visualizing data in a more creative and engaging way.

Awesome Table recently updated to being able to display images saved from your Google Drive, which is a GREAT addition. It can even be embedded into other websites like Weebly and Google Sites. For examples of what Awesome-Table can do, check out this link.

Tech Tip Tuesday: A Google Refresh!

You may have noticed within the past week or two that there have been some updates to the Google Suite. Some may still be rolling over through our district, so if you do not see any of these changes, it may take a little bit more time to receive them.

So what are the recent updates?

• Gmail has recently added “add-ons”. If you are familiar with add-ons, these are extra tools that connect to various Google Apps like docs, slides, forms, etc and increase the productivity of what you are doing, or enhance the capability of the app. So Google has partnered with other applications such as Trello, Asana, and Docusign (coming soon) which can all be activated right from within your Gmail.
• Google Calendar has undergone an overhaul. It should look entirely different (more like the new Google Sites). The entire design is bigger, bolder, and more colorful. They have also added more calendar “views” as you can select a daily schedule view or up to 1 year. The new “day” view can actually show colleagues calendars side-by-side with yours. Want more? Calendar also updated their editing window. You should notice that they added a rich-text editor to event creation window which allows you to insert links, attach files, and format text. Finally, they also enhanced the built-in search field. Just like a regular search on google.com, you can do an advanced search now and break down what you are looking for!
• First there was “Google Hangouts”, now there is “Google Meet.” You should be able to see the new Google Meet app by selecting the Google “Rubiks Cube” in the top right corner of your Chrome/Drive window. Meet is similar to hangouts, with a few small twists. It’s more like Skype, and allows up to 30 people to join the chat. Unlike Hangouts, which is fully video supported and more for on-air broadcasting, Meet allows for text chat as well, as well as dial-in meetings similar to GoToMeeting.
• Toward the end of September, Google released a Slides update. If you’ve been in Slides lately, you should have noticed a slight change to the toolbar look and feel. The toolbar is a little more streamlines but may take some getting used to. They added ‘diagram” integration which comes with a few templates that you can insert into a presentation. They have also added a “skip slide” feature which is quite useful when you want to tailor a specific presentation for various audiences but do not want to actually “delete” the slide. Just do a right-click on the slide you want to skip and select “skip” from the list. There are new add-ons in slides that include: Unsplash Photos, Pear Deck, LucidChart, and Flat Music Notation to name a few. There is also Google Keep integration, similar to how it works with Google Docs.

I also wanted to share an article that was shared to me by Jutta about Google Workflows. Check it out here!