Quick Google Tips from #METC15: Drive, Docs, & Calendar

In my last post I listed some of my favorite Google things from #METC15 a few weeks ago. Today, I'd like to share some specifics. 

The following tips and tricks were presented in the "Google Like a Ninja" session led by Greg Lawrence (@greglawrence) and Michael McCann (@mccann1776), two Google Certified Teachers and instructional technology coaches in the Wentzville School District. Their "Google Ninja Showdown" slideshow is shared here, though it only lists what they demonstrated. Their presentation was a live demo in Google Apps, a showdown of rounds in each app with the audience voting on a winner (when they could connect to the internet, that is).

DRIVE - Force your students to COPY a file to their drive:

Sharing docs in Drive via a shareable link is a lifesaver for many of us. I love that uploading a document to Drive and using that link on Moodle lets me edit or update the file for a new school year without the multi-step process of uploading it to Moodle again. 

If I want every student to have her own copy of the file to edit (a worksheet, for example), but don't want all of my students to edit MY copy, I can follow these steps to simplify things in class when they need to access the file:

1. In Drive, access the file you want to share (you can open it or simply select the file within drive)
2. Click the SHARE button 
3. Click "Get shareable link" and change the sharing settings to "anyone with the link" and "can view" or "People at [your organization] with the link can view" 
4. Click the COPY LINK button or "Get Shareable Link" to copy the URL to the clipboard
5. Click Done
6. Go to the website, doc, email, or wherever you want to post your link
7. Paste the URL into the space
8. Note where the word "edit" is in the sharing URL:
   
9. Replace the word "edit" with "copy" in the URL 
10. When your students click the link, they will be prompted with this screen: 
    
11. Students click the MAKE A COPY button and the file is now saved in their Drives

DOCS - Use "Replace with" codes for grading comments:

A simple tip for giving feedback in a Google Doc was to create your own special codes that Google recognizes and replaces with longer text. Helpful for those commonly used phrases when grading papers. In TurnItIn, we make them QuickMarks (or they are provided in the pre-made sets). This is a way to create a version of those marks in Google Docs.

1. Open a Google Doc
2. Under Tools, click on Preferences, which will show you this pop-up window: 
   
3. You can see some of the commonly "replace with" codes. Add your own! Some examples:
   
4. Use these codes when adding feedback for your students... but only in the body of the document. I thought our presenters said you could use the "replace with" feature in comments, but I cannot get them to work... I find that to be a bummer. Hopefully you can find other ways to use custom "replace with" options.

CALENDAR - Share attachments with your events:

I guess I never paid attention to the "Add attachment" option when editing the details of an event on Google Calendar before METC. Now that I'm a Google Ninja, though, I'm loving it. I see this as a great tool for my teachers who put their assignments on a Google Calendar that is embedded in their Moodle page (CJ teachers - I'd love to help you do this!). If they store their homework files (reading assignments, worksheets, project descriptions, etc.) in Google Drive and share them from there anyways, this is a great option. Also great for having people sign up for time slots for conferences, to bring food to an event, etc.

1. Make sure you have the appropriate sharing settings applied to the Doc/Sheets/Slides/etc. file you are attaching
2. Open your calendar
3. Create your event or choose a previously existing one and click "Edit Event"
4. On the event details page, click "Add attachment" next to Attachment (about halfway down the page, just above the Event color choices)
5. Choose a file you already have in your Drive or click Upload to add a file from your computer
6. Click the SELECT button
7. The file name shows up next to "Attachment" on the event details page
8. Click the red SAVE button at the top of the page
9. Now when students view the event on the calendar and click "more details", the attachment will appear as a link in the window

Stay tuned for more #METC15 sharing - Google and beyond!

Tool Review: VideoNot.es

This morning I found a video from YouTube that featured Dr. Ruben Puentedura, the man behind the SAMR model, and I really wanted to watch it and take notes. For some reason, 1999 me surfaced and I grabbed a notepad and pen. Within the first 52 seconds of the video, I realized I was being an idiot. I had already paused and gone back twice because I was trying to jot down his exact words for something. And I couldn't write fast enough. But I can type faster!

Enter VideoNot.es.  

I had shared this tool in an Ed Tech Newsletter a while back, but never really had a good chance to use it. Today was the day. 

Logging into VideoNot.es is easy with a Google account - the two sync together. Once you "connect to Google Drive" on the VideoNot.es homepage, a VideoNot.es folder shows up in your Google Drive account. Any VideoNot.es files are saved there. When you are ready to start taking notes on a video, you can either go to www.videonot.es or click the CREATE button in Google Drive and choose VideoNotes:  

Once logged in, this screen appears:

Easy to use.  I copied and pasted the URL of the YouTube video into the box on the left and it loaded the video. I hit the play button and started watching, listening, and typing time-stamped notes in the box on the right.  Any time I moved my cursor up a line, the video went back to the time stamped on the line.  I could easily pause the video by hitting CTRL+Space in the midst of typing to let me catch up when needed. My work automatically saved into the folder in Google Drive.

As I was using it, I loved it. I was very pro-VideoNot.es.  Then I tried to manipulate my notes because frankly, they aren't easy to read in the VideoNot.es interface. They are quite ugly:

A sample of my notes from today.  Pardon any typos, as I planned on editing later.

Here come the cons. 

Though the VideoNot.es files are saved in Google Drive, the notes files will only open in the VideoNot.es interface, not as a Google Doc. At this time, the only way to get the notes out of the VideoNot.es interface that I've shown above is to export them to Everote. I know Evernote is a great tool and app, and I want to explore it more as a cloud-based answer to OneNote, but it perplexes me that the connection to Google is so limited. When I saw on the main page that the tool was connected to Google Drive, I assumed I would be able to view my notes within the Google Docs apps. Not so.

I created an Evernote account, exported the notes to Evernote, then copied and pasted them into a Google Doc from there so I could revisit and manipulate them, but that was a bit tedious. Yes, I could have done pretty much the same manipulations in Evernote, but as a Google Docs user, I wanted my notes saved there. This is a big issue for me. I want to encourage my colleagues to try VideoNot.es and encourage their students to use it. Most of them have Google accounts at this point. Few of them will know Evernote and I don't like complicating the process by adding another account that they will possibly only use for this purpose. I really hope VideoNot.es and Google figure out something soon.

Once I managed to get my notes into my Google Doc, I was able to edit them, reorganize by adding bullet points and formatting, color-code sections, make key terms bold, etc. The visual learner in me appreciated being able to do that.  And it allowed me a chance to review what I had typed.  Each line of my notes, though, still contained the time stamp in the form of a plus sign hyperlink that would take me to my VideoNot.es file and start the video. Awesome.  And as you can see below, much easier on the eye.

A sample of my notes once I copied them into a Google Doc and manipulated them.

Overall, for students to be able to use VideoNot.es to take notes on flipped lessons or other important content, they need to be able to manipulate what they type. And I would love for them to be able to do so in Google.  For now, we will survive with Evernote or my work-around.

Another slightly nit-picky critique. Now that I have VideoNot.es connected to Google Drive, every time I visit the page/tool (and I've looked at it a lot over the course of the day), it creates a new "untitled note" in my Google Drive folder. I hadn't realized this, nor how I could change the title of the file, and opened my folder to find my notes only to see FIVE "untitled notes" files listed.  Oops.  I'd rather be required to name the file in order for it to be saved, or I will end up with a lot of sample "untitled file"s in my folder as I show people the website.  Maybe I should just stop visiting the site, though....