Inbox Zero

This is a review of “Find Extra Hours in Your Week: Calendar and Gmail Tricks to Save You Time” by Jennie Magiera.  

Due to the nature of the conference, Jennie’s information was all directed at users of Google Calendars and Gmail.  My remarks today will be confined to her suggestions related to Gmail.  Next year, as you know, ACPS teachers will be migrating to Gmail.  

Jennie urged us to keep the number of emails in our inboxes to zero.  All of the tips below are not only suggested as a way of saving time, but as a way of keeping a tidy inbox.

For example, Jennie suggested the use of keyboard shortcuts.  I did not know, for example, that by entering the letter “c” the box pops up where you can compose a new Email. Although I did go to “settings” and turn them on, I have not started using any of these shortcuts yet, I was just reminded of them when I begin reviewing the material for this post. There are around seventy of these shortcuts, so I’m sure I’ll never learn them all. I've just installed a chrome app known as KeyRocket which is designed to teach keyboard shortcuts. When you do a particular action, a small box pops up and tells you what shortcut you might have used. Having done that, perhaps I’ll start learning some of these shortcuts. I don’t believe I’ll ever achieve the 200-300 finger actions per minute required to become an expert gamer, however, over time, keyboard shortcuts may indeed save me some time.

Here are some other Gmail tips Jennie offered:

• Have mail from all of your email addresses forwarded to your personal Gmail account (you can still send outgoing emails using the return address and signature line from your other accounts)
• Use filters to search through your emails--even archived mail
• Use “labels” (tags) for sorting purposes--you can give an email multiple labels and get it out of your inbox at the same time
• Use filters to send automatic, canned responses to selected emails
• Use templates to speed in responding to emails
• Color code emails
• “Unsend” an email (if you act quickly enough)
• Use the Boomerang App to have unopened emails sent back to you
• Use Boomerang to have selected emails returned to you after a set time period
• Schedule the sending of outgoing mail
• Use a “vacation responder” to send canned responses while you are getting away from it all
• Transfer emails to a “todo” list which integrates with Google Calendars

I don’t know about you, but I appreciate all of these time-saving tips as well as the encouragement to keep the size of my inbox down--things which don’t come naturally to me.  I hope I have wetted your appetite for one of the first changes you will notice next year--Gmail

The Art Project

Jim Sill, a former television and movie producer, presented a session on the Google Art Project.  If you have some time after the SOLs and before the end of the year, you may with to create a lesson based on the Google Art Project which is part of a larger effort by Google known as the Google Cultural Institute.

You have probably heard that Google is digitizing books which are out of copyright, and putting them on the internet.  You are also familiar with Google Earth.  Okay, so the Google Art Project kind of combines these ideas for works of art.  The Google Art project, as of this writing, works with 345 museums throughout the world and contains 63,684 works by 8,574 artist, which various users (such as us) have arranged into 26,518 galleries.  At some of these museums the user can go to a ground level view (as with Google Earth) and use the mouse to walk around the museum.  Some of the works of art are featured in extremely high resolution--like ten billion little pixels.  

I especially like the different filters you can use when searching through this volume of material.  A user can search by artists, by collection, by medium (oil, pen and ink, bronze, etc.) by the event that inspired the artwork, by the date it was created, by media type (video, photo, etc.), or by place.  In addition, a user can search the galleries created by other users--for example one might search using “math” as a filter.  In this case the result may be a collection of pictures accompanied by questions on the prominent angles in the picture.  The person who compiled the gallery may also have embedded links, or perhaps even a video on various artworks in the gallery.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the technical aspects of how to use the art project.  Rather, let me just state that as far as “how to use” it, you could certainly use it in teaching art, or math (see above), or history--(search by material and date and the students will immediately be able to see when the bronze age was), or literature (analyze the relationship between the artwork of a period on the literature produced in that period), or science (I find a photo of a solar eclipse taken in 1889--the user included an embedded map showing the exact location where the photo was taken.)  I even found a gallery named “Bias Awareness and Bullying Prevention.”  

I’ve tried to keep this post short and interesting, so that you have the curiosity and time to go to the Google Art Project and check it out for yourself.  Click on Mr. Sill, if you wish to check out all of the resources he made available in relation to this session.  Finally, if you visit the Google Cultural Institute, you might also want to check out the World Monuments and Historic Moments which are there along with the Art Project.

The Ultimate Workflow

As most readers have gathered by now, Larry and I went to the Virginia Google Apps for Education Summit in Charlotttesville, VA in early March. Larry has been posting about some of the things he picked up and now it is my turn.
The first session I attended was The Ultimate Workflow presented by Ken Shelton, a Google Certified teacher and Apple Distinguished Educator from Los Angeles. The topic was using Google Docs to maximize productivity and he was full of tips and tricks. When we migrate to use of GAFE in the 2014-15 school year, these will come in handy! Remember, workflow = productivity.

• Color code your folders within your Drive to visually identify the content of the folder. Documents are automatically created in whatever folder you have open.
• Name your documents immediately!! (There is no "File - Save" option in Google as documents are automaticaly saved every 3-7 seconds depending on your network integrity.)
• When using Drive with your students have a naming convention and use it. "Section First Last Project" (or something similar) - such as "2 John Doe Recycling Project". The individual pieces of the name are searchable within your drive.
• Right click on any word in a document and select define for definition or research to automatically search Google for information The research pane allows you to preview the web page, insert a link and also cite the page without leaving the document. Can use arrow at top of research pane to change the style of citation between MLA, APA and Chicago. Can also use that arrow to change the license filter. Can toggle between definition and research pane. If you highlight footnote number along with anything you want to move it will automatically renumber footnotes. Under the research pane you can change the source of searching from everything (web), images, scholar, quotes, dictionary, personal, tables.
• Use of the comment feature in Docs allows for timely, meaningful feedback. They are dated and time stamped. Comments will automatically disappear when marked by a user as resolved - you can elect to receive an email when this occurs so you know when your students have resolved an issue.
• Notifications - set at “all” so you have a record of everything that went on in the document.
• Share documents from folders so anything in the folder defaults to the parent permission of the folder. You must manually change a document in the folder you do not want shared (or put it in a different folder.
• You can use Revision History to see who is doing the work in a collaborative document. The revision history shows who did what, such as deleting crucial parts of document. Once in revision history pane you can see detailed revisions.
• In your Drive, going back to “Recent” and “List view” shows the items that have been modified most recently - can see if a student is not working and should be.  Naming protocols are very useful here.
• When sharing documents keep in mind the various permission levels. "Can view" allows users to view the document but make no changes or comments. "Can comment" allows users to comment on the document. This is useful for peer review as well as teacher grading. "Can edit" gives users complete rights to make changes to the document, as well as comment. Students need to be very familiar with these levels.