Soft Technology

Stephanie Filardo: Photo credit Valerie Callan Photography Guest Blog Post by Stephanie Filardo, follow Stephanie's blog here and find her on Twitter here .  Stephanie is currently a teacher in St. Louis, Missouri I remember getting papers back with stickers and stamps as a kid.  While I may not remember the specific assignments and what I learned from them, but I remember how it made me  feel  when I saw a sticker or stamp on them.  While my teachers were just taking stickers from a page and adhering them to all of the student papers, it meant something because they took them time to do it.  They didn't have to do it, they  cared  enough to do it.  It meant something to read "Excellent!" "Great job!" "A+!" and even better when it was the coveted scratch-n-sniff sticker! This idea is brought to you by the wonderful integration of Google Docs and Google Keep.  Enjoy! Today, I'm excited to tell you about DocStickers! If you can give me 90...

Scenario One: Organized Ms. X A group of teachers wants to work together on unit plans. The department chair creates a folder and gives each of her colleagues edit rights to the folder. After all, she doesn't want to have to change permissions on every individual file. Along comes Ms. X who is new to the Googleverse. She has her very own organizational structure and being a very organized person, she wants to put her lesson plans into the folders she has created for each of her units throughout the year, so, she drags each of those lesson plans out of the disorganized mess of a folder created by her department chair into her own organizational structure. You know what's next. UH OH. All of those materials have now "disappeared" from the folder where they once lived---the folder that gave the entire team the ability to work together on the files.  Scenario Two: Upwardly Mobile Mr. Y Mr. Y is a part of the same team as the department chair and Ms. X described above. He...

So, we hope everyone who reads the friEdTechnology OR Brenham ISD blog is ready to have their minds blown!  By Guest Blogger Tom Spall, find him on Twitter  @Tommyspall I would like to thank two incredibly smart, Google- tastic friends: Jessica Powell and Amy Mayer from FriEdTechnology for this blog post! It's awesome what happens when folks put their minds together! #PLN In a recent Brenham Tech Daily blog post we discussed the new G-Suite update to Google Slides where you can now upload a video straight from your Google Drive into your Slide Presentation. Jessica Powell has taken this a step forward and decided to turn her presentations into voice-navigated (self-paced) presentations. The practical use for this in education and/or self-paced training is enormous. Just think of educators conducting training sessions online using this method. Or students taking a self-paced, voice-navigated test at their own speed. Every day Google is allowing for us to change the game in e...

Hi there, educators! I hope you enjoy this tutorial showing how to make certificates using Autocrat 3.0, which is quite different, and I think much easier, than the previous version. If you like it, please share it with others on social media, subscribe to you YouTube channel or leave a comment. Thanks in advance!

Google Drawing Templates: Please do not request access, open the template you want and create a copy. Thanks to everyone who contributed to these set! Eric Curts , Kasey Bell , and Matt Miller . http://bit.ly/GoogleDrawingTemplates

In this guide, Mike Wallace and Amy Mayer seek to provide you with all the knowledge you need as a PARENT, TEACHER or GAFE SYS ADMIN to get the most out of Google Classroom Guardian Summaries. We sure hope it helps! If it does, please share this post and encourage your colleagues to get on our email list here . All materials referred to in this post can be found here . PARENTS: If your child's school is using Google Classroom and has enabled Guardian Summaries, your job is easy. All you have to do is click "Accept" when you receive the email from ...@classroom.google.com. It will look something like the screenshot you see below: After you click the blue ACCEPT button, you'll get an option to choose the frequency of the emails you receive (daily or weekly) and your time zone. Presumably, this will keep the summaries from coming to you at 3 a.m. and waking you up.  If you don't get the invite, check your email's SPAM folder. The email should come from a "no...

My friend J.R. shared this infographic with our friEdTechnology Team yesterday and I thought it might be helpful to lots of other educators as well. Thanks to Knewton.com for the graphic and included rights to republish. Created by Knewton

By Guest Blogger Carlos from Grad Gopher (P.S. This is NOT a paid post! I asked Carlos to write this for us because Grad Gopher is going to save you TIME and make sure you get all your DATA. It really is AMAZING.) Our new, game-changing software GradGopher.com was built out of the frustration of teachers and students looking to save their information with no easy solution. GradGopher.com copies your Google Drive (Shared & Owned files), Gmail emails (with attachments), Contacts, and Calendar events to another Google account of your choosing and it only takes a minute to set up! Unlike Google Takeout, GradGopher copies all the files shared with you!  GradGopher saves you a ton of time!  “GradGopher literally saved me about 40-50 hours worth of manual labor. I can't say enough about this. It is really everything you hoped for and more.” - Colin Davitt GradGopher puts all your stuff in folders just like it was in your school account, all your organization is saved!  Grad...

Guest Post by friEdTech Technical Guru Michael Wallace  reposted from Mike's blog here . Synergyse is Free! Synergyse is now free. For those of you who are not familiar with Synergyse, it is a Chrome extension that can supplement Google training. There are hours of videos that cover basic tasks a person new to Google would want to learn about. They also cover a few in depth topics. At The Village School we purchased Synergyse for the entire staff. I did find the price a bit high, but now that it's free I would recommend it to any organization. There are two ways to install Synergyse, individually, or by Google OU,  I'll cover both. The first way is to install it for your self. In Chrome go to the Chrome Web Store  and search for Synergyse. You should see an extension that looks like this: Click the "Add to Chrome Button" and you should get a pop up like this: Click "Add Extension" and that's it. Now when you go to Gmail, Drive, or a host of other Go...

Part 2 of the series "Get your Computer Ready For Summer" explores the best way to upload ALL your files (or a whole bunch of files) over a longer period of time without having to drag and drop or babysit the process. We'll do this using the downloaded version of Google Drive which you'll install on your computer. This video is for educators who need to back up their files so that their computers can be refreshed for the summer. Don't lose your valuable files, back up now to the cloud! This technique will also let you access your files from any computer or from your phone. Links you'll need: https://www.google.com/drive/download/ http://bit.ly/FileStorageGoogle

This video seeks to answer the #1 question I get about Project Based Learning, and that is, "Am I Doing This Right?!?" The question speaks to the integrity of my favorite people, educators, and their desire to do the best they can by the students they teach. I hope this video helps you know where to focus your energy when you are trying to shift your teaching practices. Special (and HUGE) thanks to my colleague Kristy Edgar for the amazing animations, graphics, and visuals for this video. She made a simple soundtrack come alive and be entertaining.

Figuring out how to keep Google Drive organized seems to baffle many users. Here's a handy infographic to remind you of some tips and techniques! (Updated 9-6-15) PDF version here

Can't see the image via email? Visit the blog here . Try it out! Click this link to take a copy of the file . This technique also works on other Google filetypes (Sheets and Slides). Original URL: https://docs.google.com/a/friedtechnology.com/document/d/1CqUbWOHedWr9WiLO7M4aM9IIDPple1HhDGSx23tzerA/edit?usp=sharing Edited URL (the Force Copy URL): https://docs.google.com/a/friedtechnology.com/document/d/1CqUbWOHedWr9WiLO7M4aM9IIDPple1HhDGSx23tzerA/copy

More Add-Ons for Edu can be found at http://goo.gl/0YJ8Og and http://goo.gl/Yj8WoM Can't see the image via email? Visit the blog here . How to get Add-Ons: Open a Google file Click Add-Ons Search for or Choose the Add-On you Want Click the Blue Button that says +FREE  Use the Add-On by clicking "Add-ons" from the menu bar in your file

This week's tip comes from a colleague who wanted a way to automatically label email messages based on certain criterion. This technique will DEFINITELY help you keep your inbox organized as well as draw your attention to important topics. Hope you enjoy it! If you do, please hit the thumbs up button you YouTube or share the video with others via your social networks or email. If you'd like to submit an idea for a tip, please shoot me an email via the contact button on the top right of the blog. Credits, and because I am asked all the time: Screencast software from Techsmith, Camtasia for Mac does both the cool features you see in this video: the magnifying glass and the picture in picture. I love it. Thanks Techsmith!

As you may have heard, Google Apps for Education recently released Google Classroom. While it is NOT a Learning Management System (LMS), it does simplify procedures for teachers sharing files with students. Most notably, it automatically creates a copy of a specified file from Google Drive for each student within an organizational structure then allows students to "turn in" those files virtually, which changes the permissions of the file from student-owned back to teacher-owned. Students retain view rights. If you're looking for a tool to simplify and save time when using Google Apps for Education with your students, it's arrived! Hope you enjoy this hastily made video. Please leave comments if you have questions, and I'll do my best to get back to you.

If you're just switching over to the Chrome Browser or getting started with Google Apps for Education, this series is for you. Become a Chrome expert in no time starting with the first video in what will soon be a series. Hope you enjoy it!

I've always wanted to know more about the Data Validation setting in Google Forms, and yesterday, thanks to a participant question and a Google search, I learned how to make sure phone numbers in forms are entered in a consistent format, in this case, ###-###-####.  Here's how . . . Set up your "Phone Number" question in a form, then choose the Data Validation setting and Regular Expression. Insert the pattern below into the box and type your directions to the right. Data Validation String for American Phone Numbers: ^[2-9]\d{2}-\d{3}-\d{4}$ If not being able to make sure your data is consistent in a Google Form has always bugged you too, well, now you know how to fix it! Wrong . . . Wrong . . . Right!

The biggest problem with staff development is that many times, it doesn't work.  . If you want it to " work ," then you have to work .  . Here are some ideas each of us can implement ourselves (school leaders, you can help!) to make sure our own professional learning sticks. If you've attended staff development with me, and want to do #6, please email me at amy@friedtechnology.com .  Download Printable Action Plan Google Doc Action Plan Download this file in any format you want  here . Use this within your school or district freely, republish freely online with a link back to this page and an acknowledgment of authorship. 

Need help getting started writing a Driving Question? Try using the scaffold below; however, don't get locked in! This is just an IDEA for a starting point. Feel free to rearrange, get rid of, and add elements as you please. If you have suggestions to make this graphic better, please let me know if the comments or via the contact form on the right. Want this graphic as a Google Doc so you can edit it? Sure thing. Click here to get it.