Posts

Digital Tools from BETT 2019

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As a Google reference college, we were invited to present on the Google stand at the BETT Show in January. It was a great opportunity to share how we’re using Google for Education at Barton Peveril and show the impact it has had on digital learning. While at BETT we got to do lots of exploring and talked to various ed tech providers.

  • Peter Horner (IT Manager) presenting about “Going Google” at BETT 2019
  • Adam Say (Library Manager) talking about using Google Sites at BETT 2019

The following is a list of tools and other things we learned about and thought would be useful to share:

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The 12 Apps of Christmas: 8. Google Drive File Stream

On the eighth day of Christmas IT gave to me…

Google Drive File Stream

 

Google Drive File Stream is an app we introduced a year ago but is probably not well known amongst first year students or new members of staff. Put simply, you can see all your Google Drive files as if they are on your PC or Mac.

With Drive File Stream you can:

  • Quickly see all your Google Drive files in Finder/Explorer (including Team Drives).
  • Browse and organize Google Drive files without downloading all of them to your computer.
  • Choose which files or folders you’d like to make available offline if you’re working from home or a laptop.
  • Open files in common apps like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.

Drive File Stream

Google Drive File Stream is available for Windows and Mac users to try now. To install go to Applications on the desktop, next go into the All folder, and double-click the Google Drive File Stream installer. After the install has been completed you’ll be prompted to log in with your college Google account and allow access to your drive. You should now see Drive I in Windows Explorer alongside your other network drives.

You can also install Google Drive File Stream on your home computer or laptop. To download the installer go to install Drive File Stream >>

5 Top Tips for Google Docs

Automatic Substitution

If you want to save yourself some time, in the long run, you can set some Automatic Substitution to automatically change words that you type in. For example, if there are certain words you spell incorrectly all the time, you can save time by putting in the incorrect spelling and the correct spelling. This will save you time as the change will be made instantly instead of having to use Spell Checker.
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5 Top Tips for Google Sheets

Split text into columns

You can easily split some data from a single cell into separate columns. A good example of this is a list of student names where their first and last name is in the same cell, you can split the first and last name into different columns with a couple of clicks. This then lets you filter the data by first name or by last name.

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5 Top Tips for Google Slides

Embed a timer

In some lessons, you might want to let the conversation flow but others you might want to set a time limit on discussions. You might want to give the students 5 minutes to do a specific piece of work but sometimes get distracted and lose track of the time. You can easily embed a timer straight into your Google Slides presentation to help manage class time better.

It’s not exactly a function of Slides but fortunately, there’s a hack for that!

In your Slide, click Insert then Video and search for a YouTube video titled “X minute timer” where X is the amount of time. Select the video and adjust it to size. Have it fill half the page or a small portion of the page. Just press play on the video when you are presenting.
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The 12 Apps of Christmas: 2. Google Jamboard

The season of advent is upon us, shops are covered in tinsel, and Christmas songs are playing on the radio. That means it’s time for The 12 Apps of Christmas! During December the IT Services team and other contributors will be sharing our favourite digital learning apps and tools.

A festive series of new blog posts will be published and tagged as the 12 Apps of Christmas. Posts will include details about the app and ways it could be used effectively in a professional/teaching/learning context. We hope this will give you the opportunity to try out a new tool and learn more about the kind of things we’re involved in.

On the second day of Christmas, IT gave to me…
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5 Top Tips for Google Forms

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These 5 tips will help you streamline your Google Forms usage and save you some time.

Google Sheets Responses

Google Forms can automatically send all responses to a Google Sheets document so you can easily view and filter the data you are receiving. This means you can easily make your own tables and charts with the information you have. It’s updated instantly when someone submits a response to a form, you just need to turn it on.

To do that, open your form and click on to the Responses tab. You can turn it on at any point in a form and all the data will be added in even if people have already responded. On this page there will be a green Sheets icon, if you click this icon it will ask if you want to create a new spreadsheet or send the responses to a new spreadsheet. Select which one you would prefer and click Create.

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5 Top Tips for Google Classroom

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These 5 tips will help streamline your Google Classroom usage, manage how students access data and generally save you time.

Comment Bank

The Comment Bank allows you to write a set of comments that you can easily click and add to student assignments without having to type them out each time.
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Getting the most from Google Chrome

There’s a stunningly simple thing you can do with Google Chrome that can solve headaches and annoyances related to logging in to various google services, or not being able to see the printerpool printers.

If you’ve not already discovered, you are able to log into chrome itself with your google account. Once you’ve done this, everything that happens inside of chrome is done in the context of your user account. In short, this ensures that you get a consistent experience within chrome whether you’re using it at college, at home, on a chromebook, or on your phone or tablet.

All of our institutional plugins for chrome are automatically installed once you log in with your username / password; as well as the ability to print to college printers – to run that by you again, if you log into chrome on your phone, you can send work to print out from home, and simply walk up to a printer to release it the next morning.

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