How to Go Paperless at School

According to an analysis done by The Paperless Project, 68 million trees are used to make paper and paper products in the United States every year.  This analysis also finds that the global consumption of paper has increased by 400% in the past 40 years.  Additionally, The Paperless Project states that the pulp and paper industry is the fourth largest industrial user of energy.  It’s time that we embrace the many powerful and efficient digital tools to go paperless and save money, energy, time, and our environment.

Here are 10 great benefits of leaving paper and going digital:

1. Reduced paper costs
2. Reduced toner/ink and printer maintenance costs
3. Less electricity costs from running printers and copiers
4. Faster, more engaging, and more collaborative dissemination of information through digital media
5. Easier and quicker access to and searching of digital documents
6. Less physical space needed to store paper documents
7. More secure storage of digital documents
8. Less time lost to printing and copying documents
9. People learning and mastering digital tools of communication
10. More environmentally-friendly

 Also, you’ll have fewer paper cuts, and those are the worst!

Here are five free digital tools that schools can use to go paperless:

G Suite Apps & Google Classroom

If your school is a Google school, then these are a given.  Within G Suite, staff and students can create all sorts of digital documents and then share, collaborate, edit, assess, organize, and archive them.  Setting up shared folders and Team Drives is also a great way to spread information.  The Save to Google Drive Chrome Extension is a valuable tool to save almost anything you find on the Internet directly to your Google Drive in one click to make the curation of digital resources quick and easy.

Other than Google Drive and its associated apps, Google Classroom is almost a one-stop-shop in and of itself to have a paperless classroom.  Within Google Classroom, teachers can post announcements, reminders, polls, quizzes, assignments, as well as direct links to documents.  Teachers can also collect assignments submitted by students, provide feedback, and send it back to students.  Teachers can keep parents in the loop by inviting them to their Google Classroom as well.  To instantly share documents or a website to students in class on their Chromebooks, teachers can use the Share to Google Classroom Chrome Extension.

Teachers, students, and other school staff can use Blogger and/or Google Sites to share information with parents or anyone else in the school community.  Blogger and Google Sites are also good to use for displaying student work, activities, and events.

Here are excellent resources on getting the most out of the G Suite apps and Google Classroom:

Google Classroom Video Tutorial

Google Classroom Tips

How to Use the Google Classroom Extension

Google Drive Video Tutorials

Google Docs Video Tutorials

Google Slides Video Tutorials

Google Forms Video Tutorials

Google Forms Tips

Google Sheets Video Tutorials

10 Important Google Sheets Tips for Teachers

PDF Conversion

You can use a copier’s Scan to PDF feature or use a standalone scanner to convert all your paper documents into PDF files.  Using a copier to do this is the easiest and quickest way since you can load several pages into the feeder at once.  If you don’t have a copier or a scanner, you can use your smartphone.  I recommend the CamScanner app, which will let you take a photo of any document, edit it (if you want), and convert it into a PDF.

Print Friendly Chrome Extension

This useful Chrome extension lets you remove text, images, and whole pages from things you find on the Internet, which will help you save toner and paper if you really do need to print something.  Print Friendly also has features to convert a webpage or online article into a PDF and/or email it.  To learn more about how to make the most of Print Friendly, check out my article about it.  Download Print Friendly here.

Remind

Remind is an app to help improve communication between teachers, students, and parents.  With Remind, teachers can send text messages, voice clips, photos, PDFs, and more directly to students’ and parents’ smartphones.  Remind has earned the FERPA and COPPA privacy badges from iKeepSafe.

Here’s a video about Remind:

Padlet

Padlet is an online application to create, share, and collaborate on digital bulletin boards.  Users can access Padlet on a smartphone, tablet, or computer to post almost anything to a Padlet board, such as photos, documents, videos, music, Google files, and more.  Users can also comment on them to give feedback, suggest ideas, and ask questions.  Padlet is a great way to share and curate information and resources.

Here's a video about Padlet:

These tools will help schools save money, energy, and the environment all while improving productivity, communication, and collaboration.

Create and Book Appointments with Google Calendar

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.

5 Steps to Optimize Your Email

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.

Tour of the New Google Sites

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.

For more information about using Google Sites, check out this video tutorial.

Google Sites gives teachers and students many exciting opportunities to become digital creators and integrate multi-faceted learning opportunities into classrooms.

Flip Google Sheets into Fun Activities

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.

Here are the ones Flippity offers:

• Flashcards
• Quiz Show
• Random Name Picker
• Memory Game
• Word Search
• Spelling Words
• Badge Tracker
• Crossword Puzzle
• Bingo
• Hangman
• Progress Indicator
• MadLibs
• Mix & Match
• Tournament Bracket
• Certificate Quiz

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.