Tech Tuesday Tips

Do you use both Google Chrome and Calendar?  Need to quickly add a meeting to your calendar? Don't  open a new tab and enter it manually... just add it  right from Chrome’s address bar! This trick will take a few simple steps of setup, but once you’re done, you can type an event in natural language right in the address bar—such as “Faculty Meeting on Thursday at 3 pm”—and a new event will be created. We will use Chrome's ability to have special search engines to set this functionality up. First, right-click on the address bar and select “Edit search engines”. Once you get to the Search engines dialog box, under Other search engines , enter a name, such as “Add Event” , in the first box. In the middle box, enter a keyword, such as “cal” , to type into the address bar to activate this custom search engine.  Next, copy the following URL and paste it into the last box (it should be all on one line). http://www.google.com/calendar/event?ctext=+%...

During a recent Google Slides training, teachers mentioned that they miss MS PowerPoint's "record audio narrations" feature. The following instructions help you accomplish a similar outcome through video. ViewedIt, a Chrome extension, is an easy way to create , share , and track video views. Do you want to record your device screen or browser tab? Do you want to add narration / music to Google Slides? Or, do you want to create a webcam recording? ViewedIt does all of this with just a few simple clicks. After video is created, it can be shared via email and social networks. ViewedIt is integrated with Gmail. It will add a thumbnail image of your video in a Gmail message. When you send a ViewedIt video using Gmail, the viewer's email address is tagged to each view. You will receive notifications stating what percentage of the video was viewed. Videos sent through other types of email or social networking will not be linked to a specific user. You can trac...

One of the best features in Google Docs, Slides and Drawings was the Research Tool. Through the Research Tool, which allowed authors to do research simultaneously as they write or edit a document. From one place, you could search different Google services including: Scholar, Images, Quotes, Dictionary.  The great thing about the Research tool is that it allowed an author to easily insert citations and links to a document. Once an image, document, or resource was picked , the user click on “cite” and Google Doc automatically inserts the citation according to the style wanted ( MLA or APA, or Chicago).  Unfortunately, in September 2016, Google dropped the Research tool for the Explore tool in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. While this tool still provides the insights, design tools, and research recommendations that the old tool did, the citations feature was mysteriously missing!   Last week, Google improved upon the Explore tool and brought citations bac...

Quizlet Live is an in-class, team based learning game. It puts the students in randomized teams (automatically) and gives each group different questions within the study set. Each team is made up of 3 or 4 students with a randomly assigned animal team name. (You can reshuffle the teams until you are satisfied with the groupings.) Each member of the group has different answers and only one person has the correct answer. The group needs to work together to get the correct answer to get the points.  Incorrect answers reset the team’s progress to zero. The first team to match all 12 terms correctly in a row wins. At the end of the game, teams see what they matched correctly and incorrectly. In the teacher mode, you must have the following to do Quizlet Live: At least 12 questions and answers in the set At least 6 students ready to play 10 to 20 minutes of class time To create this on your own: Website to set up your Quizlet account:   https://quizlet.com...