Does this sound familiar? You are on a website and remember you need to make a Google Document of some sort, so you have to go to your waffle, click on Drive, and make the document. It seems ridiculous, but the steps it took to get there can be shorter. Yes, shorter! If you add the Chrome extension, Google Docs Quick Create, you can just click on the Google Drive icon that comes up on your Chrome browser bar, get a menu, and create from there. YES! I added this extension as soon as I saw it. Ready to make my life easier with just one click. See how awesome that is?! Love it!
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Bored with "Find Someone Who"? Tired of "2 Truths, 1 lie"? Yawning over "Get to Know You Surveys"? Chance are, your students are, too. Let's see how to revamp these ice breakers for the 21st century learners in your classroom! There will be mixed ideas, some for lower elementary, upper elementary, middle school, high school, GAFE schools, etc. Find what applies to you or modify it to make it still work for you!
This is only a sampling of what you can do. If you have some other go-to ice breakers you love, let's hear about them below! Think about Back-to-School Night. Parents file in, you are connecting with all of them quickly, trying to make a good first impression, giving them information, and it is just a rush. Then you hit the end of the night, realizing parents didn't fill out the contact log or that you wanted to send a thank you for coming note, but don't know where to send it. Google Forms is here to help! Go to Google Forms and make a Form, get a URL, shorten it (makes it easier to display), display it in the room OR make a QR code for parents to scan to go there instantly. When they get to the Form, have them put in their contact information. I recommend asking for the following information:
Keep it short and simple. The responses will fill in to your spreadsheet. BAM! Instant contact collection. Is there one folder on your Google Drive that you don't want to touch? Let me guess, the "Shared with Me" folder? Yes, this folder is a nightmare for those people who like their files to make sense from an organizational standpoint. I feel the fear when I go in there. No way to organize them, afraid to delete them, curious as to WHY someone would share certain things with you...the list goes on and on. Here is how you can best organize this folder. Things you access regularly: There are documents someone has shared with you that you access almost daily (think, dismissal changes, lab schedules, testing schedules). You can click the box next to those and then choose "Add to My Drive", which has darkened along the top of the screen. It is now added to your Drive where you can place it into your nicely organized folders. Things you never, ever look at: Delete them. But wait, does that delete it from the owner? Nope, it only deletes it from your Drive. The owner still has the original and you no longer have to skip over it in your list. Google Classroom documents: One thing that has come up is that even though Google Classroom creates a nice folder in your Drive, it also puts all those shared documents in the Shared with Me folder. Yep, that right there causes the overwhelmed feeling to rush back! At this time, there is not much you can do to fix that. Some have said you can delete them from "Shared with Me", but there is the concern that it will delete it from the Classroom folder. Not 100% sure about this, but you could try it out. Ultimately, it will still belong to the student, who is the owner of the document. Or just do what I do...avoid that folder unless you know someone JUST shared something with you! Lol! One thing people miss from Microsoft are the templates. No fears, Google has you covered!
When you are in the Drive application you wish to use, go to New > From Template. A new tab opens up that may appear blank at first. It defaults to templates created and saved by Hallsville.org users (yes, we can create and save our own...think, common forms we use in the district). From the top bar, you can choose "Public Templates". Once there, you can search and find what you are looking to use. When you find what you want, choose "Use this Template" and it will open a copy. You can rename it as your own at that point. That's it! Easy, right? So many of us love to use the keyboard shortcuts, and it isn't any different in Google. They actually won't allow right clicks to get to some of the more popular functions, like cut, copy, and paste. Here are some shortcuts you may consider using in Drive. You may even want to print them off and post them somewhere near your computer. Another idea, take the more popular ones and post them around your classroom for students to see. Thanks to TeachThought for this list!
Have a collaborative project for students? Did someone delete important information and you need to find out who it was? Welcome to viewing revisions in Google Drive! If you would like to see the revisions done to a Google Drive app, you can do that very easily by viewing the revision history. You can even revert back to an old copy, if you like! Click on File > See Revision History A window will open to the right of your document. Each person has their own color. The blue is one person, green is one person, orange is one person, and purple is another. You can see that there are multiple orange dots, that is all the same person and the changes they have made. When you click on that revision history, the box turns grey, as shown in the first box above. Then any changes that person made during that revision, will come up in that color on the document, as shown below. Everything else goes to gray scale, while the revision is in the color of the person that made it. This can be helpful in seeing if a student took your revision suggestions and made them. You can see if someone peer edited a little too much (or wrote the paper for someone else), the time it was worked on last, and probably more! Again, a useful tool for teachers, seeing revision history of a Drive app. This applies to Presentation, Drawing, Spreadsheets, and Docs. It may also apply to other apps, too. Have you ever created a Doc, shared it, and instructed people to make a copy, but they start typing on it, causing all documents to be changed? If so, this will solve that problem! This is not necessary if you are sharing through Google Classroom. This is only if you are sharing or emailing the Doc link out to people. Again, you do not need to do this if you are running it through Classroom. When the user clicks on the bottom link, this is the screen they will get. This is what their title will read. Why would we need to do this? Forms teachers need to fill out (CARE team), reflection forms after PD sessions, Docs you need only a handful of students to fill out and return, etc. This prevents files from being ruined if deletions or edits occur.
You do not have to leave your Google Doc to search images. You are able to search within any Drive program for images from Google, LIFE magazine, and stock photos. The photos pulled up in this search are also images that can be reused with modifications, which means you have permission to use the images, a much better option to going to Google Images and just searching randomly! This works within any Drive program: Docs, Presentation, Forms, etc.
Once you search, you can narrow your search to show just faces, photos, clip art, or line drawings. This is a really neat feature that can be useful for projects. I searched the butterfly life cycle and was able to look at photos, clip art, and line drawings - which showed a lot of diagrams. I really like that these are images you can use freely without worrying about use. When you create a document it is, by default, private and owned by you only. There are permissions you can change as the owner. I am here to walk you through what they all mean. A box will pop up for you to set your sharing settings. It will look like the image to the right. From here, you can add in the names of people you want to have permissions on this document. On the right side it says "Can edit". Click that for this dropdown menu. Three options appear. People you share with can...
These options can always be changed by the owner at ANY time. |
AuthorFifth grade teacher in a 1:1 iPad classroom, sharing my journey with technology in the classroom Categories
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