Learning in the Lou

Your students shot a video and now you want them to share it with you. They can't email it to you because the file is just too large. The solution is simple, just upload it to Google Drive. Open the video file on the phone. Click the share icon. Find and click the Drive icon. Name the file. Click Save . It will take a few minutes to fully upload the file. Find the uploaded video in the Uploads section. Click the ice cream cone icon . (three little dots) Click Add people . Add the email addresses of those you want to share the video with.

This simple tool is becoming very powerful. Check out all the voice commands for an idea of what you could do. 

Copy Center Issue Sometimes you have this one paper document laying around that you need to quickly send to copy center. Sending over the paper is possible but that takes time. Why not just use your phone to scan and send? How Open the Google Drive app on your device. Click the plus in the lower right corner. Click on the Scan icon. Line up the document you want to scan. Click the blue circle at the bottom. This image looks amazing. Click the check to save it. Open Drive . Open Recent . Click the file you just scanned. Click the ice cream cone . (3 dots in the upper right) Click Send file... Click Gmail. Send your new PDF to the copy center. NOTE! email subject line: Copy Job for YOUR NAME body of email: describe what you want. Make 75 copies of attached file on white paper. 2 sided. Stapled.  Make sure you have an email signature so the copy center can call if there are issues/questions with your job.

The Copy Center So you have this existing Microsoft Word document you need to send to someone (Copy Center) and it really should be a PDF. Follow this process for a quick conversation. Open your existing Word document. Click File in the upper left side of the screen. Click Save As Click Desktop. (or wherever you want to save the PDF to) File name - make sure you have one Save as type - click and scroll to PDF On my desktop sits this brand new PDF!

ISSUE Your students are writing a bunch of stories. How do they easily start a new page for each chapter? Is there a better way than hitting enter a million times? SOLUTION Click Insert . Click Page break .

WHY It is always nice to put a face with a name. Sometimes we need a tiny little reminder of what someone looks like because we don't see them very often. Follow these steps to add/change the image associated with your Google account. HOW Open your email. Click your image. It might just be a blue circle if you have not added something already. Click Change . Find an image you like. Your amazing new image will appear. From now on everyone can put a name to a face!

WHY A professional email signature has all the contact information making it super easy for the recipient to call you and quickly open your website/Facebook page/blog. (You are also required to have the proper signature in every email you send.) HOW Open your email. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen. Click Settings . Scroll down the page. Select the button below the No signature button. Leave a space before your signature. (Like the yellow highlighted section.) Add your signature. Name Title/grade Department Building and address Phone Number and Extension Links (blog, Facebook...) Scroll down and click save!

ISSUE You want your students to build a website/blog for a project but you are not sure where to start. There are about a million options but this post is going to focus on Google Sites. WHY Google Site is pretty easy to use and all your students already have access. Just login with your school account at sites.google.com HOW Follow these simple steps to get a website up and running in no time. Login and click the Create button in the upper left corner. Name your site. Click Create . This is what your newly created site will look like. Creating a new page. Name the page. To create a blog-like site choose announcements. (K-8 can't use blogger. This is a great alternative.) Click Create at the top. Here is the new page you just created. A sample of what a few posts would look like. Sharing the site is very similar to Google Docs.

I am never more than ten feet from my work bag most every day. Inside I usually have about twenty random pens and all of these Post-it notes. Seriously. I absolutely love them. When someone asked me what I wanted for my birthday (which happens to be in a few days) I told them Super Sticky Post-its. I was scrolling through my twitter feed today and saw this post on edutopia . It talks about a teacher's frustration using Google Docs and her experiment with Post-its. You have to read it. I think every one of us can feel her pain and excitement as the experiment paid off. These notes are so popular with teachers 3M create a series of pages to help generate other ideas on using them in the classroom. Did you know there is even an iOS Post-it note app ? Hit me up if you ever want to chat about Post-its.

Search Technology Redux - by brewbooks Problem You want your students to look up information or do a little research on their own. You turn them loose and they do exactly what we do. They just Google and click on the first link they see. Sometimes they end up clicking on the ad which might lead them in a wrong direction. Does this sound like something you have experienced? Solution Custom Search Engine - it is exactly like searching Google except you can limit what it searches. Searching butterflies on Google gives you millions of pages to look at. A custom search limits the results to a few websites you pick from. Creating this is pretty simple. Custom Search Engine Creation Start - cse.google.com Click New search engine . Add sites. These are the only sites your students will be able to search. Click Create . Click Public URL .  Some will email this to their students while others may paste it to a Google doc to share it that way. Either way yo...