As one school year ends, most of us are already thinking about next year. Some of you may be teaching a new course, handing off a course to a new teacher, or adding new teachers to your curricular group. In any case, chances are you will either be sharing some Google files with someone or having them shared with you. I know you all do this all the time, but there are a couple of slight changes that have occurred that I wanted to let you know about.

Copying a file vs. creating a shortcut:

In the past when someone shared a file with you, right-clicking on that file in your drive and choosing "Make a copy" would result in a new copy of the file that you owned that was no longer connected the original. Now, if you right-click on a document shared with you in Drive, the Make a copy option is now under "Shortcut options". Therefore, it will create a copy of that shortcut, still leading to the original file. (See first screenshot on the left). There is not an option for the document itself in that menu. This is important to know because you may want to make changes that the original owner doesn't want. If you make those changes in the copied shortcut, you're still editing the original doc, not a new copy.  

How do you avoid this? You will have to click into that shared document and then click on File, Make a copy. This will create the new document.

One thing to keep in mind: If Google is creating a new copy of a document, you will be prompted to name it and choose where you want it to go. If you click on "Make a copy" and it doesn't ask you these things, you have just created a shortcut.

Transferring ownership:

Another thing you may want to do (I'm looking at you, retirees 🙂) is transfer the ownership of your files to another teacher. Rather than going through the share process where they will need to make copies of everything so it doesn't get lost when an account closes, you can transfer ownership of your files to someone else in the Arrowhead domain. To do that:

• Go into share on the file or folder you want to transfer. (You can transfer an entire folder so you're not repeating this process on all the files.)

• Add the person you wish to transfer ownership to as an editor and save that.

• Go back into share and click on the dropdown next to that person. You can then choose "Transfer ownership", which will make that person the owner, and you an editor. 

This way, nothing will disappear on them.

Today's tech tip is an add-on for Google Forms that will allow you to "cold call" on students without the anxiety, embarrassment and lack of thoughtful responses that often comes with that practice. By using the Popsicle Stick add-on from Alice Keeler, you will be able to give students time to think about their answer instead of just getting fast answers, and you will allow students who might normally not speak up to contribute their thoughts and share them anonymously (or not!) with the class. 

This add-on will only pick random answers from the first question outside of a name question. So, you would not want to use this on a long form, and it will be best to have one generic form where students will enter their answer. You will verbally pose the question to your class and give them time to think and type those answers. This add-on even has the option to create that form for you.

To use this add-on:

• Head to this link and install the add-on.

• Create a new form.

• Click on the puzzle piece icon at the top of the form and choose "Popsicle Sticks Form".

• From the pop-up menu, click on Setup for the add-on to automatically create a two question form - one for the students' names and one for their response.

  • If you want the responses to always show as anonymous, you can delete the name question.

  • If you'd like to give the students the option to attach their name or not, you can turn off the Required option in that question.

  • If you want to make their name required, leave that enabled.

• Ask your question in class and have students enter their answers into the form. (Link the form in Canvas or give them the URL.)

• Once students have answered. click on the puzzle piece again, choosing the Popsicle Sticks From again. This time, choose "Show Random Response". You will get a pop-up with one response. On the left you will see a screenshot of an anonymous response and one with the name attached. Trigger warning - highly controversial opinion in that screenshot. 😺

Once you have finished collecting responses on your question, you can go back into the add-on and select "Ask another question". This will clear your responses and you can ask another question now or whenever you decide to use the form again. You will not need to build a new form each time you use this. 

If you do want to save your students' responses, you should click into the Responses section and click on "Link to spreadsheet". Once you do that, the responses will stay in that sheet and you can still clear out the responses on form itself to ask a new question.

You can read Alice's full blog post on this tool here!

Today's tech tip will be helpful for when you need to send the same message to multiple people without it being an actual group email. Gmail now has a "multisend" feature that will send your email to each person in the "To" field an individual email. This will keep your recipients from seeing your whole send list and avoid the reply all responses.

To use multisend:

• In Gmail, click the button to compose a new email.

• On the bottom tool bar, choose the Multisend icon (seen on the left). 

  • You might need to expand your message window to get to this icon if your left/right scroll bar isn't showing at the bottom of your message.

• Once you enable multisend, you can add all of your recipients to your To field, up to 1500 people!

  • You do not need to use the CC or BCC fields. No one will see the other recipients.

• You can also personalize the email by using merge tags like @firstname. If you add that merge tag into your message, it will pull the first name of each contact into that space in the email. You can select your merge tag from the drop-down menu that appears when you type the @.

  • Available merge tags include:

    • First name: @firstname

    • Last name: @lastname

    • Full name: @fullname

    • Email address: @email 

Tis the season! AP exams are only a couple of weeks away. Final projects will be due. Final exams will be shortly after! And then of course there is the end of the school year, which is a countdown students may enjoy just a bit more.  😃 

The website vClock has options for an alarm, a timer, a stopwatch and world clocks.

Timer:

• AP Gov has the distinct honor of being the first AP exam this year, and so it is our example to the left. That countdown timer will continue to run until Monday, May 1 for students to see each time they log in. 

Stopwatch:

• Many of you have some version of a final presentation that kids have to prepare. And we all know that a well prepared presentation that fits in the time guidelines is a gift to the teacher! You can use the Stopwatch embed to give students a place in Canvas to practice while timing themselves while having easy access to the instructions/resources for that assignment.

How to set and embed timers/stopwatch:

• To set the timer:

  • On the vClock website, click on Timer to the left, and then Edit Timer in the main screen. You can choose whether to have the timer just count down a set amount of time or countdown to a certain date/time in the future. Set the options to what you'd like, and then click on Start. 

• For timers and stopwatch:

  • You can set a few different colors in the settings in the upper right corner of the main screen.

  • Scroll down on that main page to where there is a button for Embed. Click that, change your sizing options if you want (dropdown box shown on the left.), and then copy the HTML code. 

  • Head back to your Canvas page and go into edit mode. Click on the HTML symbol below the text box area (</>). 

  • Place your cursor where you want the embed and paste the HTML code in. Click the HTML symbol (</>) again to check its placement.

    • You can center the timer/stopwatch at this point by having your cursor on the same line as the timer and changing the alignment using the tool bar.

  • If you find that you want the embed to be bigger or smaller, you have two options:

    • Go back to the vClock page and change the sizing there, recopying the embed code and replacing it in Canvas.

    • Click that HTML button again and change the height and width in the existing embed code. You can play with that until you like the size.

  • Click save and you should be set!

Today's tech tip is about the two features you can access while presenting a Google Slides presentation in Presenter View.

• First, to access Presenter View, click on the arrow next to "Slideshow" and select Presenter view. You will see there that this will give you the ability to have a Q&A function for the audience, along with allowing you to view your Speaker notes during the presentation.

• When you click on that, a new tab will open that shows a thumbnail of the slide you are on to the left along with a large panel on the right where you can toggle between Speaker Notes and Audience Tools. If you click back to your original tab, you will see that your presentation is now in slideshow mode. (Info below on how to project that to your board while viewing your notes or Q&A session.)

• If you have entered speaker notes in the area below your slideshow in the editing view, you will see them in the Speaker Notes section. As you navigate the slideshow (which you can do from this screen by clicking on the "next" slide to the left), the speaker notes will change to match the slide you're on.

• If you'd like to give you students/audience the ability to submit questions to you as you present, click on the Audience Tools tab. There, you will click the "Start New" button towards the bottom.  This will place a website URL on your presentation screen for your audience to use to submit questions to you. You can choose whether you want to only take questions from the Arrowhead Union High School domain of if you want to accept questions from anyone.

  • If you require the domain, students would need to be logged into their Arrowhead Google account, but there is a click-on option to ask the question anonymously. This could be a great tool for some of our quieter students.

• As questions come in, you will see them populate on your presenter screen.  You will see the person's name if they didn't submit anonymously. You can click on the Present button to push that question to your presentation screen if you'd like to discuss it, and then Hide to go back to your presentation.

  • You will also see a like and dislike count. Anyone who has the question asking screen open will also see a stream of the questions, and they can click on like or dislike, which will register on your screen. Maybe they can upvote something they also have a question on, or it could be used to poll the audience/class.

If you'd like to use this method in your classroom, here's how to set up your system to get your presentation on the big screen and your speaker notes/Q&A list on your laptop screen. (You may want to get it all set up ahead of time to save a little time, if possible.)

With your laptop connected to your dock:

• If your setup isn't already giving you two separate screens, hit the windows button + P and then choose "Extend". This should give you an open desktop on your monitor, which is what will project to the front board.

• Start your slideshow in presenter mode where it is on your laptop screen.

• Click back to your original slideshow tab and drag it to the monitor from the laptop. Once you drop it there, you can hit F11 to make it full screen and get rid of the browser around it.

• Now, you should be able to see your speaker notes and questions on the laptop screen while the presentation presents on your monitor and through your projector.

Let me know if you'd ever like some help getting set up to use this in class!

In a recent Canvas update, they added the ability to quickly mark an assignment missing or excused in the Canvas gradebook. In the past, you had to go into each individual grade and click on a Missing or Excused indicator. Now, if you're in the gradebook grid view, you can simply type MI for missing and EX for excused into the grade area and it will create that label. 

Two things to keep in mind for missing grades: It doesn't show anything besides the color indicator (unlike Excused where you see the word), but you can also type in a zero over the missing label if you'd like to have that show as the grade along with the color indicator for missing. 

When you sync those grades to Skyward, it will automatically click the Missing or No count boxes in Skyward so you will no longer need to go to Skyward separately to do so.

If you've attempted to create an email group or update a contact from Gmail  in the last couple of years , you've likely noticed that getting to the Contacts app was far from intuitive. Good news! In a recent update, Google added a contacts button (orange box)  in the right side panel in your Gmail screen. (Previously, you'd have seen the icons for Calendar, Keep and Tasks.) Just click on that icon and your contacts will open in a side panel and you can edit contacts from there, all without leaving the Gmail screen.

To add a contact or create an email group, click on the pop-out icon (purple box)  to open a new page with Contacts. As a reminder, email groups are now created as "Labels". You create a new label first, and then add that label to the contacts you want in the group.  There are two ways to do this:

1. Search your contacts for a group member, click on that person, and add the label to that contact.

2. Click to the left of each contact to select all of  the members you want in the group, then click on the label icon (green box) at the top and choose the label you want to assign them all to.

This one is a follow-up/add-on to last week's tech tip and for those of you that find yourself changing the font and/or font size every time you open a new Google Doc. (Thank you to Christina Callies for the nudge!) 

To change your default:

• In a Google Doc, type some text and format it to the font/size/formatting to which you would like all new docs to default.

  • Highlight that text.

  • Click on Format.

  • Hover over Paragraph Styles, then Normal Text.

  • Click on "Update 'normal text' to match".

• Now any new doc you create will default to this style.

You can also update other text types such as headings, titles, and subtitles. If you normally use those functions, use the same steps to create new defaults for those.

Tis the season! Listed below are reminders/instructions on some of those beginning of semester tasks that we only do then, both in Skyward and Canvas. Click on the topics below for step-by-step instructions and screenshots.

Setting up your Skyward gradebook

Importing content into Canvas courses

Setting up your Canvas gradebook

Suggestion for grade syncing from Canvas to Skyward:

• Once grades have been synced to Skyward, it is best practice to no longer sync them, for a couple of reasons. 

  • Everytime you do that, it will overwrite any changes you've made in Skyward. For example, if a student makes something up after the initial grade sync and you enter the grade in Skyward, it will erase it each time you resync that grade.

  • Each time you sync your grades, you're resending more and more data points. To be perfectly blunt, that is more and more opportunities for a glitch in the connection. It will also slow down the overall transfer. 

• Once a grade is synced, the easiest thing to do is go to your Assignments page, and unclick the Sync to SIS button. Click on that icon (second from the right side) to toggle between not syncing and syncing. (See icons to the left.)

Please email me or visit me this week if you'd like assistance with anything as you prepare for 2nd semester! (Today - SC, Wed - no tech, Thur - NC, Fri: 8:30-9:30 am @ SC, 1:30-2:30pm @ NC)

Happy New Year!! Today's tech tip is another (we hope!) time saver when you're in Google Docs. If you need to format multiple parts of a document in the same way (for example, bolding section headers or underlining vocabulary words), you can select those sections of text, even if they're not connected, and format everything at once. 

To select your text, start by highlighting your first text chunk. Then, select the rest while holding down the Ctrl button. (Double click to select a single word, triple click to select an entire paragraph, or click and drag to select your section.)

Once you have everything selected, make your formatting changes and voilà! You can change the font, the formatting, the size, the color...any formatting option you need. 

This week's tech tip is a long requested update in Google Docs. Although the ability to merge cells in a Google Docs table has been around for awhile, we finally have the ability to split them!

To split a single cell into multiple rows or columns, just right click in that cell, choose Split cell, and change the number of columns or rows you want. 

(Follow the same right-click process after highlighting multiple cells if you want to merge them!)

All too often we find an article or blog post online that would be great to use in class, but the website is full of ads and pop-ups and we don't want to send the kids right to it. But printing it? Pages and pages and pages.

Chrome Extensions to the rescue! This week's tech tip is the extension Print Edit WE. This extension allows you to choose which content from a website you want to print and which content you want to get rid of. To start, install the extension from the link above. Then, you have some options:

1. For some websites (such as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel site that I used for the examples to the left),  just activating the extension will cut out all photos, ads, etc. The top scroll to the left is the original article. The bottom is what immediately happened when I opened the extension on that page. I will admit this was an incredibly pleasant suprise.

2. For other websites where this doesn't happen automatically (such as a recipe blog post I tried this on), once you activate the extension, you will get a tool bar at the top and will automatically be in select mode. 

   • If most of the site is excess stuff you want  to get rid of, click on/select the sections you want to print. Once you've selected what you want to keep, click on "Delete except" at the top. I would choose restricted so it stays page width and does not go into full screen width.

   • If you actually want to keep most of the content and just have a few excess areas to get rid of, click on/select the parts you want to get rid of, click on "Delete" at the top. 

3. Click preview once you have a layout you're happy with. This will actually bring up the print dialogue window so you can print your newly cleaned up article. 

4. There are definitely more options in there to play with if you're interested.

There are a lot of options in the Canvas Gradebook to make viewing it and finding things easier. But left in the default state, it is a MESS!!

Here are some quick changes you can make to clean up your gradebook view. All of them are found by clicking on the View option in the gradebook.

1. Change your view: Hover over Arrange by, and choose the method that works best for your needs. Do you want to just see the latest assignments? Choose Due Date, and have it sort newest to oldest. Do you want to be able to see all of the assignments from a particular unit together? Choose Module and group things into those modules that you want to view together.

2. Add filters: There are three different filters you can add to your gradebook view that will allow you to take your view down to a certain category with one click. Hover over Filters, and you can choose to add a filter for Assignment groups, Modules, and Sections.

   1. Assignment groups - Use this to see only one type of assignment on the screen.

   2. Modules - Use this to see only the assignments that are in a certain module.

   3. Sections - Use this to only see one of your hours, not all of them together.

      1. Keep in mind - you can use all of these filters at the same time, narrowing down to a very small group of grades.

3. Modify how submission statuses look - Canvas defaults to a variety of light pastel shades to denote when an assignment is late, missing, resubmitted, dropped or excused. To change those colors to make them more noticeable upon a first glance, click on Statuses, and click on the pencil on any status you'd like to change. The default options are all light pastels, so if you'd like something brighter, head to this website and use the color picker to create a color you like. Just copy the HEX code from the top and paste that into the box in Canvas.

4. Get rid of uneccesary columns - There are two columns that you can choose to include or hide from your gradebook view.

   1. Unpublished assignments - Click this off to get rid of all the assignments that are in your course that are not yet published/assigned. (Depending on if you've imported a prior year's course, this could take A LOT out of your view.)

      1. This is also helpful to see if you've got some random things published that shouldn't be!

   2. There is a Notes column you can also toggle on and off. You might use this for notes about students, or you can get rid of it.

Click here for more information on the functions inside the Canvas Gradebook.

Here's another for those who wind up with many, many tabs open each day. Do you know you have a document open or a website that you found that you want to get back to but can't tell from the tiny tabs up top which one it is? Search your tabs!

• Open the search tab either by clicking on the carrot in the top right of the browser OR by using ctrl+shift+a.

• If you don't have that many tabs open, you'll see a list of open tabs and recently closed tabs and you can just click on the tab you want to go to.

• If that list is a bit longer, you can enter a search term at the top, which will narrow the list down to open tabs and recently closed tabs containing that word.

If you're a keyboard shortcut fan, this week's Tech Tip may be old news. But hopefully a few of these will be new and useful for many of you! I'm not including some of the more basic shortcuts, but there is a full list of keyboard shortcuts available here.

Clicking shortcuts:

• Double click on a word to highlight the whole word.

• Triple click in a paragraph to highlight the entire paragraph.

Formatting shortcuts:

• ctrl + Shift + v = Paste without formatting. 

  • This will take something you've copied from another source and paste it in the same formatting as the document you're pasting into. A nice shortcut when bringing in something from a separate document or website without having to go back and reformat the new material into the correct font, size, etc.

• ctrl + . = Superscript

• ctrl + , = Subscript

  • Use these as you type to avoid having to go back and highlight and format the text you wanted in superscript or subscript.

• Ctrl + Shift + 7 = Numbered list

• Ctrl + Shift + 8 = Bulleted list

• Ctrl + Shift + 9 = Checklist

  • You can use these when you start a new list, or you can use these shortcuts wherever your cursor is to turn that paragraph into a list.

• Ctrl + Space = Clear all formatting

  • This will remove all formatting and take the highlighted text back to your default. (Font, color, size, bold/italics/underline - all of that will be removed.

Other useful shortcuts:

• Ctrl + k = Creates a hyperlink on the highlighted text.

• Alt + Enter = Opens the hyperlink that your cursor is sitting in.

• Ctrl + Shift + t = Opens the last tab you closed (helps in those whoops! situations). You can use this shortcut multiple times in a row to continue reopening the last few tabs closed. 

• Ctrl + Shift + c = Generates a pop-up that includes a page count, a word count, and a character count. (Image featured on the left.)

Photo by Florian Krumm on Unsplash 

You can use keyboard shortcuts (the same you would use in a document) to copy and paste or cut and paste files in Google Drive. This can save some time and clicks!

To make a copy of a document, you can still use the Make a Copy function which is easiest if you're wanting that copy in the same folder the original is in. If you would like the copy to be elsewhere, you can simply click once on the document you want to copy in Google Drive to highlight it. Then, press Ctrl+c to copy it. Now you can go to the folder in the drive in which you'd like the new copy to be and press Ctrl+v. The copy will generate there, while the original is left where it was.

To move a file, you again can still use the Move function, but depending on where you're moving it to, this can involve a lot of clicking out and back into folders in Google Drive. To move it quickly, again highlight the file with a single click. Press Ctrl+x, open the folder you want to move the file to and press Ctrl+v to paste that file there.  The file will show up in the new location and will no longer be in the original file.

As we get ready for Open House this week, many people are looking at the best way to share files with students and parents. Embedding and sharing a link are the two most common methods. Read below for descriptions of the differences in what a viewer can access/do with those files. Photos on the left!

1. Embedded files: When you embed a slideshow, it is shown in presentation mode, so the viewer will not see the "raw" Google page where it was developed. They will be able to navigate through the slideshow, but will not be able to open it as a working doc. There is a limited navigation menu at the bottom of the embed (in the red box).

   1. Remember to use the embed code, not the Canvas embed tool, so everyone can see your embeds.

2. Link from "Publish to the web":  This is a way to share in the same fashion as embedding, but as a link. When a viewer clicks on this link, they will see the slideshow or doc in a new tab, but also in "presentation" mode, not with the working Google Drive menu around it. The only ability in this view is to move forward and backwards through the presentation or to move through the doc.

3. Shared link: When this link is shared, you are sharing the raw view of the doc or slideshow. (Note you can see the slide index on the left and menus up top.) As long as your share settings are "view only", they will not have editing rights, but they will be able to download the file or make a copy by default. To change that option, go into the sharing settings and click on the settings gear in the upper right. UNCHECK the option for viewers to download, print and copy (purple box in the screenshot to the left). When you do this, you will see what is noted in the green boxes in example number three - Export options are disabled, and the Make a Copy function is greyed out. Make sure you have the sharing settings set to Anyone with link if you are posting things that parents need to be able to view, NOT Anyone at Arrowhead.

Welcome to the 2022-23 School Year!!

You can now add emoji into your Google Docs as you type by using the @ followed by a descriptor for the emoji you want. It will give you a list of emojis that fit that descriptor and you can choose it by clicking on it. 

This feature is only in Docs right now. You will still need a workaround (like this Chrome extension Emoji Keyboard or Insert --> ) to insert emojis into Slides and Sheets.