Update for Google Drive

If you use Google Drive a lot in your work, you may have noticed a recent addition - Team Drives.

In the past, If I know that I'm going to be sharing a lot of materials with a certain group of people, say my PLC, I would create a folder and share it with all of the members of the team; doing this means that any materials that are saved to that folder will be automatically shared with the people who have rights to the folder. The one problem with this was that if a team member left for some reason, their documents left too. Team Drives fixes this issue, when a team uses Team Drives, all documentation stays with the drive even if a member leaves.

Copying the Contents of a Cell to the Bottom of the Column

I find it really annoying when I'm working in a large spreadsheet and have to copy a formula that I just entered all of the way down to the bottom of the column. Mind you, this isn't much of a problem if the spreadsheet only goes down to the bottom of the screen, but I often work with spreadsheets that contain information on students in multiple buildings; this can mean that I'm dealing with thousands of rows of information. Having to click on the "auto fill" cursor (you know, the little plus sign in the lower right hand of the cell) and drag down through thousands of rows can be a real pain...if only there were an easier way.

How To Split Cells In A Spreadsheet

Have you ever had a spreadsheet where you'd really like to split a cell that contains multiple data points (last name, first name) into individual cells with only one data point each? I know that I used to use this a lot for taking my class roster and separating the last and first names. Today I'm going to show you how to use the Text to Columns feature, in both Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel to do just that.

Google Sheets:

As you might expect, with Google Sheets generally being a simplified version of Excel, the process of splitting text to columns is fairly simple.

1. Right click on the column to the right of the column that contains the text you'd like to split.
2. Choose the option Insert 1 left; you're going to need to do this for each additional word. Since I will end up with two separate words in this example, I only need to do this step once as I only need one extra cell.
3. Highlight the cells that you want to split.
4. Click the Data heading from the toolbar.
5. Click Split text to columns. This will take the first name and place it into the second column that you just added.

Google Classroom Users Can Now Assign Quizzes Through Quizizz

For anyone out there who has used Kahoot, you probably already know how much fun students have playing, I mean studying with it. I recently found a new tool that is similar in some ways to Kahoot, but offers some interesting differences - that program is called Quizizz.

Like Kahoot, Quizizz allows you to create multiple choice questions. Like Kahoo, Quizizz gives you a code that students type in to their device after going to a login screen (join.quizizz.com). And finally, like Kahoot, students gain points by answering questions correctly, and the faster they answer the questions, the more points they receive. The way that Quizizz differs from Kahoot is that students are not tied to the teacher's overhead to see the questions; students see the questions on their own devices.

Customizing Your Profile Photo for Your Google Account

Have you ever received an email from someone and saw either their picture, or a picture of something that represents them and think "How do I get MY picture to show up?" Today I'm going to show you just how easy it is to link your picture to your Google account.

Using Google Doc's Voice Typing Tool

Recently I had a teacher come and ask me if I had a way of helping support a student that needed another method for getting his thoughts down on paper. I immediately thought of using Google's text to speech tool. I thought I’d do a little more research on it and discovered that it is an extremely easy tool to use, all you need is the microphone that is built into your device, or if you'd prefer something different, you can purchase an external microphone.

Google Apps for Education (GAFE)

There seem to be two camps in our school district when it comes to Google Drive, those who love
it and have embraced it, and those who don’t understand how it works and treat it as if it is some magical place. To try and clarify it for the second group, I’ll start out by asking how many of your use the shared drive at work?

Many of the people who have shown concern over the idea of saving files to the cloud have no qualms about saving files in our shared drive, an offsite server, which is pretty much the same thing. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing tips and tricks on how to use some of the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) such as Google Docs (think MS Word), Sheets (MS Excel), Slides (MS Powerpoint), and Forms. While there are quite a few differences between the Microsoft and Google versions of these programs, and while the Microsoft versions are far superior in some aspects, many people won’t notice much difference switching from the old standby to the cloud based GAFE versions.

For When You Just Need the Text to Speak to You

Last year, our district started its 1-to-1 initiative by putting Chromebook carts in my classroom and each eighth grade classroom (because we had all taken REMC's Blended Learning in the Classroom course).  I was on one of the teams that had a number of students who had accommodations stating that texts and assessments be read aloud to them.  My problem that year was that I only had support during one quarter of my classes, so if I was going to read every chapter from the book, and every quiz and test aloud, ALL of my students had to hear me; while this benefitted some of my students without IEPs, many of my students complained of being distracted.

In order to make sure that I was meeting the needs of all of my students, I started recording myself reading chapters using Audacity, but found that that was very time consuming; there had to be another way.  I'm not sure how I discovered Chromevox, which is a screen reader extension for Google Chrome, but I do know that many of my students benefited from hearing the text read aloud while they followed along in their books.