Keeping Students Informed

We all know the feeling. The students show up to class, you tell them to put away everything but a pencil because it’s test time, and they groan and announce they knew nothing about the test. Right.

Your students have Google accounts. Why not add those major events to your Google Calendar and “invite” the students. This gives you two more points of documentation of the event: it sends them an email telling them it’s been added, and it adds it to their school Google Calendar. Add to the fact it’s probably on your blog in lesson plans and has been announced repeatedly in class, and you’ve covered more ground than anyone would expect.

If you create Groups in your mail Contact list ahead of time (learn how HERE), this process is made even more simple than it already is. You’d just type the name of the Group and the entire list is populated automatically.

Let the Google Gooru walk you through how easy it is to keep your students informed of major events using Google Calendar.

Common Planning Time Assistance

There always seems to be the need to meet with your team, and you end up standing in the hall between classes trying to find who is available when. Well, let Google Calendar do the work for you with the Find Available Time option. If your team keeps their calendars up to date, this will save you loads of time. Let the Google Gooru walk you through the steps.

Creating Appointment Slots on Your Google Calendar

This is a great, short tutorial from the Google Gooru on creating appointment time slots on your Google Calendar. Keep in mind, you have to be in either Week or Day view so you can select the time slots you want in order for Appointments option to be available. Also, Those picking slots have to have Google accounts themselves since it will automatically collect their name for you.

This would be excellent for any number of classroom or school based functions:

  • reserving a time slot for writer’s conference with teacher
  • reserving device cart
  • reserving computer lab
  • reserving ThinkLab (our innovative learning space)
  • tutoring or extra help
  • PBL presentation sign-up
  • and more!

Creating Folders and Filters in Google Mail

One of our high school staff had a great question today. He has his students submitting their work through Google Drive and he wondered how to create an email filter to automatically move those incoming email notices about the files being shared into a folder so as to not clutter up his Inbox.

Keep in mind that Google calls their folders labels. Here is a great video that walks you through the entire process in just two minutes.

Easy Formative Assessment in Google Apps

Using Google Apps in your classroom with your students? If not, you should be. There are just way too many tools within the Google Apps environment that can make your life so much more efficient and the students so much more empowered. Take a look at Pear Deck as an example. One of the best parts about using this tool is that both the teacher and student can log into the Pear Deck system using their Google accounts. So, no need to create new ones. Yeah! Another time saver.

As always, let me know if you need help getting rolling with this tool. Always happy to help out.