It's our 30th issue and we've got tips from Alice Keeler!

Our Instructional Services staff was fortunate enough to attend the 2017 ITIP Summit featuring Google for Education last week in Sandusky. This two-day event provides teachers, tech coordinators and other educators with excellent educational technology information. We all attended wonderful sessions and learned a lot of great info that will work its way into future trainings.

One of the highlights of the conference was being able to hear from keynote speaker Alice Keeler, who is a self-described mom, teacher, author, Google Certified Innovator, keynote speaker, and workshop presenter. Alice has been called the Queen of Spreadsheets and notes that "the answer is always a spreadsheet!" She has written three books, "50 Things You Can Do with Google Classroom," Go Further with Google Classroom," and "Teaching Math with Google Apps."

Chris, Kim, Kristie and John with Alice Keeler

Alice also shared a variety of tips in her workshop sessions, and we'd like to bring a few of them to you in today's TTT.

In Google Forms, no need to use the sidebar to add questions:

Control-Shift-Enter (Command-Shift-Enter on a Mac) inserts another question
Control-Shift-J (Command-Shift-J on a Mac) moves a question down
Control-Shift-K (Command-Shift-K on a Mac) moves a question up

For collaboration in Slides and Sheets:

Rather then sending a copy to every student, consider using one document for collaboration, having each student add a tab (Sheets) or slide for their own work. That frees you up from open 30 documents.
Each slide or tab has its own unique URL so have students use the goo.gl shortener extension to create a shortened link and turn that in.
Use the Question and Answer feature in slides to get instant class feedback

More stuff from Alice:

All the Chrome extensions she has developed
Cool add-ons and scripts she has created
Awesome templates from Alice

Alice has lots more great info on her website... including books she has written. You can also follow her on twitter @alicekeeler.

Comments

Power up Google Classroom with Private Comments

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 informat...

What the SHEETS?!?

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...

Magically Make a Copy

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.

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