Google tips for tech cafe


Tomorrow I will be doing a short presentation at our district’s Tech Café on some google tips. The hard part is figuring out which tips will be most useful.  Here are 4 different cheat sheets for google docs, search and mail.

Google for Teachers II

Google for power users

Google Cheat Sheet

Gmail tips

In addition, the nice folks who created GoogleGuide have some very excellent tips for searching effectively. And WebDesignLedger (WDL) has a nice guide with 11 different cheat sheets listed as well. There is so much information out there!

The bad part is, these things go out of date so quickly. Someone spends a ton of time making and formatting it only to have Google add features that make the “tip” irrelevant. Keeping up is a hard thing to do. And then, looking towards the future here in Washoe County, we are planning on moving to live@edu with Microsoft. That takes away the need for Google Docs, because we will all have access to 25 GB of storage as well as Word, Excel,  and Powerpoint.

Hmm, what to do, what to do. Relevant and useful, while still teaching things.

Here is my list:

1.  Searching with the “filetype:” command. Not many people know that you can specify a particular filetype when you search. For instance the search command, “modular mathematics filetype:ppt” will give all results for modular math that are powerpoints! How handy is that when creating lessons! Acceptable common formats for filetypes are: pdf, ppt, doc, xls, rtf. If you go to www.google.com and click “advanced search” for the rest of the types as well as more options.

2.  Using multiple calendars to keep track of different types of events.

3.  Publishing a calendar and allowing parents or students to subscribe to the calendar to keep updated on events (sports calendars, speech & debate calendars, etc)

4.  Enabling the calendar lab to post the birthdays found in your Google contacts on your Google calendar (making Google calendar and contacts to work together.)

5.  Using Google Bookmarks to store and communicate all those bookmarks you have to other people (I set up a new bookmark list for every speech and debate topic and share it out with my debaters).

6.  And, if that does not fill the 45 minutes (and I am pretty sure it will!), I will go over these last 2 ideas. I love these, and will be using the “homework hotline” idea next year for sure!

A homework hotline using google docs and creating quizzes (self grading) with gdocs.


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