Tech Tuesday Tips

One of the most powerful elements of Google Classroom is the private comments feature, which works with assignments only.  Comments become conversations with students, allowing for more back and forth discussion than can happen with verbal feedback. Every student can have a voice and communicate their ideas or struggles with a task. To use private comments, open an assignment in Classroom, and there you will find a space for private comments. Any comments left here will be seen only by you and the individual student. One of the challenges to using private comments is knowing who the comments belong to. Here’s a workaround from Alice Keeler : Students start all comments to you with your last name You start all comments to students with your initials This helps in filtering those comments in Gmail, or searching. It also lets you quickly see who responded last in the roster: You can also use links in private comments to give students more information, shar

When creating a new Google Sheet, by default, it will have one sheet tab at the bottom of the page. The program is designed so that you can have a maximum of 200 sheets. To add additional sheets, you can click on the plus sign in the sheets toolbar. One sheet will be added. To rename the sheet, click on the dropdown arrow next to the Sheet, and select RENAME. You may want to explore other sheet tab options available from the menu. There may be times when you want your Google Sheet to open to a specific tab. To accomplish this, copy the URL of the specific sheet tab. For example, if you want the Google Sheet to immediately open to the second sheet tab named Chart, copy the Chart sheet tab URL. You will notice that the information to the right of the / changes: Google Sheet URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hivDhrInFjmhl-AFB_frFOvpsyuY541hxn6ShQuo7I8/ edit?usp=sharing Chart Sheet Tab: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hivDhrInFjmhl-A

OK so now I have your attention! If we re-arrange the words a bit "I want to take a shot of my screen" aah yes screen shots but what are they good for? Many websites while allowing students to do drill and practice and take quizzes, they lack the ability to save or record scores or results. Have the students take a screenshot of their results and submit via google classroom as an attached image. Screenshots are a way of capturing a picture of your screen, be it your chromebook, a desktop computer or even your cell phone. The secret to unlocking this feature is to know the magic key combinations or button presses for your particular device. Windows - The old standby is Alt + PrnScn which copies the entire screen to the clipboard. You can then paste it into your favorite editor to save as an image file. Windows 7 and above - Included in your list of apps is one called the Snipping Tool . Add a shortcut to your toolbar and when invoked this app lets you take a scree

By: Kristie Hughes Do you have to constantly tell your students or other people to make a copy of your document so that they can edit their own copy?  Well, you can force this to happen just by changing the link of the file. Go up to the top of your file (google doc, slides, etc) and go to the end of the URL.  Delete the word "edit" and everything after it. Type the word "copy" in it's place. Then click return. When you give this link to other people, it will automatically prompt them to make a copy of your file. In fact, they won't even be able to see your file, until they click on the Make a Copy button. Now, you don't have to worry about anyone changing your original file, or reminding people with view only rights to make a copy to edit. 

I just LOVE the Sign in with Google buttons that you find all over the web. They are great because they use a protocol called OAUTH to securely log you in using your Google account. This means you don’t have to remember yet another username and password. We get so used to clicking these buttons to log in to sites and that means we’re racking up a bunch of sites that have access to our Google accounts. Today, I’m going to show you how to manage the connected apps and sites that you’ve authorized with your Google account. We can use this tip to review these apps and sites to see if we really use them and if we want them to have access to our Google account. Just follow these steps: Click your photo at the top right of any Google window, and select My Account. On the left side of the My Account window, click Connected apps & sites Then under the Apps connected to your account section, choose Manage apps. This will give you a list of a

I see a lot of teachers and students using iPhone’s Calculator tool in class.  Just like with any calculator, it is easy to hit the wrong number key.  Rather than clearing the entire calculation and starting over  [sigh!], there is a quick way to backup. To clear the last digit entered, simply swipe left or right on the calculation window. If you need to backup a few more spaces, swipe the number of digits you want to erase.