The work days of teachers and school administrators are
nothing short of busy. One of the more difficult
things to coordinate amidst all the hustle and bustle is meetings. Finding common free times, making
appointments, canceling appointments, and just remembering it all is a huge
task in and of itself. Google Calendar
has a hidden gem of a feature called “Appointment Slots” to make all of this
simple, efficient, and easy.
Appointment Slots is exactly what you think it is. It is a way to create a calendar with
customizable time slots that people can reserve for meetings, conferences, or
any other kind of appointment. I’m
thinking of using this feature to create calendars for teachers to reserve the
use of iPad carts, so there are plenty of other uses for this feature besides
personal appointments. Here’s how to
create your own Google appointment calendar:
1. Sign in to your
school Google account, and open Calendar.
2.You can use your
existing calendar, or you can create a new calendar just for appointments.I recommend creating a new calendar to use
only for this purpose.
3.On the left side
of the screen, click the + sign next to “Add a coworker’s calendar”.Then, click “New calendar”.
4. Name your calendar
and add a description if you want.
5. Once you’ve
created the new calendar, click the calendar itself on the date for which you
want to create appointment slots. Then,
click “Appointment slots”. Now, you can
adjust the title, date, time, and duration of slots. You can also click “More Options” to change
other things. Click “Save” to finish
creating them.
6. To have people
book appointments, click on the title of the appointments on your
Calendar. Then, click “This calendar’s
appointment page”. This will open a
webpage to book the appointments. Copy
the URL of this webpage and send it to whomever you want to book
appointments. People must have a Google
account to book appointments. They can
book appointments by clicking on an available slot, and then clicking “Save”. They can return to this page to cancel or
change their appointment.
This is what the appointments page looks like:
You and the people booking appointments will get notifications and
reminders through Calendar. Since
teachers and school administrators do so much through Google as it is, this is
an efficient way to make the scheduling and managing of meetings easier and
simpler.
According to research done by the Radicati Group, an
estimated 11.2 billion emails were sent every hour of every day across the
world in 2017. The research also found
that an average office worker received 121 emails and sent 40 emails per
day. Email was the preferred method of
communication for 86% of professionals. In
light of this digital deluge, the efficient management of emails is an
important way to bring clarity and calm to your work life. Here are five steps you can take to tame the
wild world of email. I will be focusing
on Gmail, but these steps can apply to any email service.
1. Purge
If you were to take only one of these steps, this is by and
far the most transformative. Simply put,
delete all the emails you truly don’t need.
Decluttering your inbox (or anything else for that matter, such as a
room or a car) will make it much easier to find things, and it will make the
things you still have easier to manage.
In Gmail, check the box next to the emails you want to delete. Once you have all those selected, click the
trash can icon near the top of the page to delete them. The deleted emails will still be in your
Gmail trash, and you can go there to permanently delete them.
2. Unsubscribe
Over the years, you have probably signed up to get emails
for a variety of sources. You may also
be getting emails from places where you didn’t sign up. Spam filters are usually good at detecting
and removing spam emails, but many unwanted or useless emails still get to your
inbox. There is a quick and easy way to
reduce the number of emails you get by unsubscribing from them. At the bottom of an email is usually a link
that you can click to unsubscribe or update your email preferences for that
sender. Just click on that link and
unsubscribe. Here is what those links
may look like:
3. Organize
The first two steps will greatly reduce the number of emails
you have in your inbox, which will make this step of organization much
easier. In this step, you will create
labels for you Gmail. These are
essentially folders that you can drag and drop emails into to categorize and
organize them. This will help you manage
all your emails and make it easier to find them since they’ll be in
categories. On the left side of Gmail,
you will see “Inbox”. Scroll down that
left side until you see “More” with a down arrow next to it. Click on “More”, scroll down, and then click
on “Create new label”. Now, you can name
the label something like “Lesson Plans” or “Parents” or “Administration”. Once you have created all the labels you
want, you can drag and drop your emails into these labels.
4. Use Email Groups
In a school or business, there are always
certain groups of people we email on a regular basis. Typing in each
recipient in the To field (and even remembering all the people you want to
include) can be tedious and time-consuming. Having a ready-made email
group makes the sending and organizing of emails faster and easier. Email groups can be handy for teachers as
they can create groups for parents, committees, courses, extracurricular
activities, etc. Below are screenshots and instructions on how to do this
yourself in Gmail.
First, click the down arrow next to “Mail”,
and then click on “Contacts”.
Next, click on “New Group...”, and then
name the group.
Now, you can add people to the group.
Click the button with the plus sign, and then type in the email addresses
of the people you want in the group. When you’ve included all of them,
click “Add”.
On the Contacts page, you can select a
group to email. Or you can return to the Mail page (click the arrow next
to Contacts), compose a new email, and type the name of the group in the To
field.
5.
Undo Send
We have all experienced that sinking
feeling in the moment after sending an email you wish you didn’t send. Gmail has a way of making that wish come true. There is an undo send feature in Gmail that
gives you the ability to stop an email from being sent even if you already hit
the send button. When you’re in Gmail,
click the gear icon on the right side of the screen. Then, click “Settings”. Click the box next to “Enable Undo Send”, and
then select the amount of time you want to give yourself to undo a sent
email: 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Once you have undo send enabled, a narrow
window will appear at the top of your Gmail inbox with the option of undoing
the sent email and showing you how much time you have left to do it.
Hopefully, these
steps will help you live a more manageable, organized, and efficient email
life.
The students who are now in our classrooms are digital
citizens through and through, having grown up with computers and the Internet
at their fingertips. Teachers are asking
them to become more than digital consumers.
Students are now being given the opportunity to become digital creators,
which activate and strengthen many important skills. One tool that teachers can use to not only
improve classroom communication, but to also allow students to be digital creators
is the new Google Sites.
The new Google Sites is a vast improvement over what is now
called Classic Google Sites. The new
Google Sites offers trendy modern aesthetics, increased ease of use, and
adaptability to PCs and mobile devices.
It provides many other cool features that you can explore once you get
into it. Since many schools use G Suite
for Education, the new Google Sites is a perfect tool to integrate into a
classroom as it works seamlessly with all the other G Suite apps. Teachers can use it to give their students,
families, and coworkers a look inside their classrooms. Students can use it for a variety of projects
for different subjects. I’m going to
give you a tour of the new Google sites below.
You get to Google Sites in Google Drive, and all the Sites
you create will be in your Drive. Just
right-click in Drive, and you’ll see the following menu.
At the top of Google Sites, you’ll see a place to name your
site as well as buttons for undo, redo, preview, link, share, options, and publish.
You can also add a logo that will appear as a small image in
the upper left corner of your Site. You
even have the option of using the color from the logo as a color theme for your
Site.
You have three options for the size of the banner: large banner, banner, and title only. The “title only” is the smallest of the
banner, making the content of your website appear farther to the top of the
page.
You can change the background image of the banner to one of
your own images, or you can choose one from Google’s gallery of images.
Double-click anywhere in the blank area of your site to make
the insert menu appear, where you can insert a text box, image, or file from
Drive. You can also use the menu on the
right side of the screen to get insert options.
If you want to add a footer to your website, you can do that from the
insert menu as well.
The menu of insert options on the right side of the screen
provides more features, such as inserting a divider, YouTube video, Google
Calendar, Google Map, or something from Google Drive. You can also easily move these items around
your page and resize them to fit your layout.
The Pages tab is where you’ll go to create, name, and
organize pages and subpages on your Site.
You can style your Site with any of the available themes
under the Themes tab. If you know the
hex color code for a particular color, you can configure that too.
Click the gear near the top of the page to choose between
top navigation or side navigation. You
can click the eye icon near the top of the page to preview your Site and how it
would look on a PC, tablet, and smartphone.
Finally, you can publish your Site by clicking the Publish
button at the top of the page. Here, you’ll
get access to publishing settings and the ability to unpublish it if you want
to take it offline.
Google Sites gives teachers and students many exciting opportunities to
become digital creators and integrate multi-faceted learning opportunities into
classrooms.
Google Sheets is a powerful tool in the G Suite line-up, but
it’s not all formulas, pivot tables, and data.
Google Sheets can become a fun, interactive learning opportunity with the
help of the Flippity add-on. With Flippity,
you can quickly and easily turn a Google Sheet into an engaging learning
activity for almost any content area.
The first thing you will have to do is install the Flippity
add-on for Google Sheets. You can get
the add-on by clicking here. Once you
have that, you can begin creating Sheets and turning them into fun activities
to use with your students. Flippity offers
15 different games, tools, and activities to use. For each one, Flippity provides a demo
version, instructions, and a template, so you don’t have to do much of the work
on your own besides plugging in your own content to customize each template.
Flippity is a great tool to bring some fun, engagement, and
interactivity to any learning activity for any content area. Plus, it is easy to use and (the most
important part) free. To learn more
about Flippity, please click here.
There is one skill that is absolutely valuable no matter the
future goals and careers of our students.
That skill is the ability to be an effective reader, writer, and
communicator. Communication skills
routinely top the list of attributes that employers seek in candidates. While students are still in K-12, having
sharp reading and writing skills will help them across all content areas. And maybe, just maybe, those skills will help
them to enjoy reading a good book for fun.
Teaching reading and writing is a daunting task given the
complexities of language and the diversity of students. Tack grammar onto that, and it gets even more
arduous. By their nature, these are difficult
and time-consuming skills to teach. Here
comes technology to the rescue!
Quill is a powerful, but easy-to-use online program that teaches
ELA skills in a personalized, adaptive, and real-world system. Once teachers create their classes on Quill,
they can assign units, lessons, and activities from ready-made materials that
are CCSS-aligned by grade. Teachers also
can see the names and numbers of the standards to narrow down what they want to
use. If teachers already use Google
Classroom, then they can create their Quill classes with only a couple clicks
as Google Classroom is fully integrated in Quill.
Then, teachers can give diagnostics to their students to see
which standards each student needs to address to become proficient. Quill will then automatically create individualized,
“just right” lessons and activities for the students to address weaknesses, but
teachers can also assign materials themselves.
Besides creating their classes on Quill, teachers do not have to create
anything else. Instead of creating and
correcting assignments, teachers can use their time to better understand their
students' ELA skills and simply assign them the lessons they need.
The lessons and activities on Quill are adaptive, adjusting
themselves in real-time to the answers of the students to provide personalized
exercises. Students also get immediate
feedback, help, and multiple tries when doing activities. Additionally, students can re-take lessons as
many times as they want.
Teachers get detailed reports with in-depth information on
their students’ performance on specific ELA skills and standards, showing their
proficiency percentage on each one.
Teachers also see which lessons and activities their students completed
and when.
I saved the best thing about Quill for last. Quill teaches ELA skills they way they are
supposed to be taught: within the
context of real literature and writing.
Quill does not teach these skills in an isolated, fill-in-the-blank,
multiple-choice form. Students work with
real written passages in order to gain an understanding of how language
actually works and how context, word choice, and sentence structure affect the
overall outcome. For example, if
students are working on subject-verb agreement, they not only have to correct
errors, but they also have to re-write the incorrect sentence and make sure
they use correct spelling and punctuation in the re-written sentence. Other exercises like figuring out how to best combine many ideas into one cohesive sentence or re-wording sentences for clarity are what set Quill apart and make it a comprehensive and effective learning tool. Quill provides an authentic, real-world, and personalized
way for students to learn ELA skills, and it makes it quick and easy for
teachers to use.
Quill provides five unique tools to teach ELA:
1. Quill Diagnostic – "Quickly determine which skills your students need to work on. The diagnostic covers vital sentence construction skills and generates a personalized learning plan based on the student's performance."
2. Quill Lessons – "Enables teachers to lead whole-class and small group writing instruction. Teachers control interactive slides that contain writing prompts, and the entire class responds to each prompt. Each activity provides a lesson plan, writing prompts, discussion topics, and a follow-up independent practice activity."
3. Quill Grammar – "Over 150 sentence writing activities to help your students practice basic grammar skills from comma placement to parallel structure. Activities are designed to be completed in 10 minutes, so you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom."
4. Quill Connect – "Using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining, students combine multiple ideas into a single sentence. They then receive instant feedback designed to help them improve the clarity and precision of their sentences."
5. Quill Proofreader – "Teaches students editing skills by having them proofread passages. Students edit passages and receive personalized exercises based on their results. With over 100 expository passages, Proofreader gives students the practice they need to spot common grammatical errors."
There is a free version that is comprehensive by itself. The paid versions offer more features and are
very affordable. Below is pricing information and a video about Quill.
