In an earlier post, I listed some links and information to help you setup auto-posting from your campus or teacher public calendar to a twitter account. Twitter provides a host of customization options which can help personalize your page, as in the example below with our campus colors, background image and custom links formatting. Here’s a link to the Twitter help page with instructions on how to customize your own page :)
Click the image or here to visit the page!
Now that the district has rolled out G+ for required professional development, you might have questions or need refreshers on some of the features of this powerful and vast platform. The online help guide has lots of information and tutorial videos to help you… here’s a link (or click on the image): https://support.google.com/plus/?hl=en#topic=3049661
Chrome allows you to setup and synchronize a variety of profiles according to your needs, and to access them through icons in the top left corner of the Chrome browser. My setup looks like this (the Green checkmark shows the current profile):
This is useful because each profile (blue and red icons and arrows below) has its own set of bookmarks (blue and red rectangles below) and extensions associated with it which synchronize across all of the computers you use. My wife’s profiles are loaded too, so if she needs to access important bookmarks or extensions, she can load her profiles (work and home) from my browser whenever she needs to. The green arrows show you how to add profiles from the Chrome settings window:
The number of Google Apps For Education (GAFE) resources for your campuses is likely to explode very quickly, and organizing drive folders and documents for easy access will become very complex, especially since those folders and documents will most likely be created and shared by a wide variety of staff with no common organizational scheme. While this is liberating for the originators (since there’s no need to adapt to any organizational vision) it can be quite frustrating to those who are trying to make these new resources readily available… in fact, unless you’ve already created an organizational folder structure for your campus, even getting started will seem like a monumental task. One solution which I highly recommend is to create a directory of resource and links in a single Google Spreadsheet and then post a link to that directory to your staff and in your G+ communities links sections. This will allow you to create a structure through labels and links which can be sorted/filtered in a variety of ways and will function independently of the mindset of the originators. I’ve started working on one for BMS this morning, which you can view at the following link: Public View link of BMS GAFE Resources Directory
I’ve added these to the ‘More tips…’ section of the Tech Topics Blog (right-side panel). There are many useful tips and techniques located on these sites for all skill levels:
If you keep a paper gradebook along with your Skyward electronic version and you get a new student in your class, most likely you will add that student to the bottom of your list (and they will, consequently, be out of sort order with the rest). Your electronic gradebook will add that student in whatever sort order you have selected (most likely alpha order by last name). The following screenshots will show you how to make your Skyward electronic gradebook match this ‘out-of-sorts’ custom order (i.e. match your paper copy):
This morning I accidentally deleted a large bookmarks folder while trying to copy it to another Chrome profile… there is no undo option for this :( I did, however, find the following instructions to be extremely useful in restoring a backup bookmarks file which might be useful to you at some point! http://www.howtogeek.com/111784/how-to-recover-accidentally-deleted-bookmarks-in-chrome-firefox/
Here’s a link to the G+ post with instructions: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115174107767353780511/posts/3px2V6AdcjC
…or you can the following link to view them directly (once the image loads, click on it to zoom in and scroll around): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/197021/Tech%20Posts/EmbedProcesScreenshot.png
This is a great tip from Alice Keeler (posted here) which would also work well in other situations (like demonstrating something in your Chrome setup on someone else’s computer while they’re logged on)
This is cool: http://www.labnol.org/internet/import-html-in-google-docs/28125/
More great ideas here: http://www.labnol.org/
