Forms........OH the Possibilities!

Google Forms is a free application (found in Google Drive) that allows you to:

• Create forms, surveys and quizzes. (Yes, my teacher friends, I said quizzes.)
• Share the form with others. (You mean I can share a quiz with my students?)
• Allow others to complete the forms online. (Oh Yipppeeee!!! Keep talking.)
• Collect the responses in a spreadsheet. (Oh my!! This is the most exciting news since I found out the school resource room started stocking fun colored Sharpie markers.)
• Provide you with helpful summaries of collected data with charts and graphs. (My administrators do love charts and graphs.)
• But what about students who "forget to put their name on the form (quiz). Don't worry. Google Forms allows you to collect respondent usernames.

--- IT Girl

Share and Share Alike

I’ve talked about sharing a lot. Sometimes sharing is overrated, like when it comes to cookies and ice cream but not your documents. Sharing is really the big plus to cloud computing/storage and digital collaboration. So, how does one share their files you ask well, that is today’s topic.

When you share a document or a folder or anything else you create in or with Google you can also determine if the person you are sharing with can edit or just view your files. This sharing thing is not limited to just files you create in or with Google. You can also share files that you upload to My Drive. 

 

From the My Drive window, check the box next to the item you wish to share.

Click share button

Now you have some choices on HOW you would like to share your files.

1.      To manually add people, enter email addresses in the Add People box.

2.      To add people from contacts, click the Choose from contacts shortcut once you have clicked in the Add people box. Select the people you want to add and click the Done button.

Click the Can edit box and select whether you want the user to edit or view the item.

You can either check or clear the Notify people via email ox. You can also click the Add message shortcut and enter a message to the user. You also have the option of sending a copy of the message to yourself.

Click the Share and Save button.

Done. J

Lessons Learnerd (So far)

Lessons Learned

Creating a folder:

When you click on Create

A menu will appear with choices of what to create. Folder should be the first choice.

Select Folder.

You will then be prompted to name your folder.

The folder will appear in a list in the My Drive section of the screen.

Sharing a folder:

This is where the learning kicks in.

Notice in the graphic above there is a check mark in front of the folder named DRFS. This is a must. That check mark opens up new choices on a new menu bar.

 

The button with the person and the plus: that is the share button. Click here to share the check marked folder from your My Drive list. Now, flashback to a previous post where you are then prompted to add the people you want to share the folder with. You can do this using email addresses.

Downloading a document:

Most important lesson learned is this: downloading a document from your My Drive. I didn’t realize how important this was until I was working with a student and realized something just didn’t add up.

 

 The “problem” was that the student had uploaded a Word document to her Google Drive. When she went to the library to print it there was no print option available. What was happening is that the Word document was there and it would open but it opened in Google View. This did not allow her to print but she could see her file. When in doubt consult the menu bar. I clicked on the More button and near the bottom of the list was a download option. That is what we needed. Once we clicked on download, the Word document was downloaded to Word and we were able to open and print. Whew!! I guess Isaac Newton was on to something when he said “what goes up must come down” the same is true of cloud storage. What is uploaded must be downloaded. J

--- IT Girl

Two Birds. One Stone.

The subject of today’s blog is Google Document and it is brought to you by……well, if I am being completely honest, it is a beautiful grey day outside and I have a couch calling my name so, today’s blog is brought to you by “other things to do or not do”. Let’s jump right in shall we? I have quite a large list of things to do for work over the weekend, not one of them is something I wish to devote my weekend time to so I decided to kill two birds with one stone so to speak. We started a 1:1 initiative this year at DRFS. In order to make the laptop initiative more than just one more thing teachers had to do, we tried to find ways to add value and subtract chaos. The campus services approximately 800 students. (You can make up your own mind whether that is a large or small population of students.) The school does not have wireless printers and the district has a limited number of technicians so students are not connected to classroom printers. And even if they were, there was really no provision for managing that much printing traffic on outdated and small capacity printers. Plus, there are no additional funds for printer paper.

In an effort to address the preexisting road blocks, I started thinking about collaboration. How do we collaborate in a digital world? Many meetings and trainings happen via email and trainings are now webinars. How could that kind of technology be harnessed for education? Enter the cloud. What if teachers and students could “work and communicate” on a digital level in the cloud?  I was already using DropBox with my colleagues but didn’t feel like it would be enough space or functionality for what teachers and students would need. So, I started researching Google Drive: more free storage, email, and a ton of apps that could be used to improve student achievement, engagement and bring our classrooms into the 21^st Century.

So now that you have the back story let’s get back to the two birds with one stone – I promised teachers that I would create a one page document for them to share with their students on how to set up Google Drive. (We got the student email addresses late in the laptop check out process so I was unable to get all the students up and running before they went to class with their laptops.) I fired up my laptop this morning to blog and work on that to-do list. Then it hit me. Rather than fire up Word to create my “one-pager”, why not create it as a Google Doc and then blog about that? So that is what I did.

I opened my Google Drive. I clicked on the red CREATE button in the left hand navigation menu and poof! A blank document opened up. I was able to type and do basic formatting. I didn’t get all crazy and add a page border. I added a header. I only do that when page space is limited. (I have been accused of using too many words so I am trying to keep all instructions to one page – at work J) I inserted some images and poof! My work was done with no more effort than creating a document in Microsoft Word. One thing that I did find a little confusing is that there is not a SAVE command or choice on the File menu. Google automatically saves your document to your drive. Thank you, Google.

When inserting a graphic, you actually have to click a button on the pop-up screen to upload the picture from your computer. The process isn’t all that different from inserting a picture and browsing for it using a program that is not web-based. But if you aren’t familiar with the term “upload”, it may throw you for a loop. Once you are finished with your document, you can share it with other people or it can just sit in your Drive until you are ready to do something else with it. You can select how to download it – Word file or even PDF. The functionality of Google Document is very similar to Microsoft Office. I doubt a novice Office user would notice any difference in the Google Document application.

The silver lining to this cloud-based application is that if you are purchasing a computer and do not or cannot spend the extra on the Microsoft Office bundle, you can take advantage of Google’s free web base application.

 

There it is!!! One of today’s birds J

To the Left

Yes, we are still talking about Google. No, this is not a political piece. No, this is not a line dance.

To the left…..

What is on the left? It’s a navigation menu. You can navigate to different parts of your Google Drive by clicking on the sections in the Left Navigation section.

My Drive: View all the files you have uploaded or saved.

Shared with me: View the files other users have shared with you.

Starred: View files that you have specially designated.

Recent: View files that have been recently accessed.

More: View the expanded view of Left Navigation including Activity, Offline Docs, All Items, or Trash.

What if I don’t want to create a file within Google? I have other files that I want to store in My Drive? Is that possible?

Absolutely!!!

You can upload files.

Click on the Upload button (The little red button next to the Create button)

 

Select Files from the menu

Locate (Browse) the file you want to upload.

Click the Open button.

The file will appear in My Drive when the upload is finished.

Advanced: To move the file to another folder of a location on the Left Navigation.

Sunday Funny

I

I'm taking a cue from Bill Kaene the cartoonist and creator of The Family Circus comic strip. I don't have Billy posting today but I did do a little search for Google funnies. Here's what I found. 

Ok so maybe that's not funny "ha ha" but still generates a smile. 

I'm also a huge Big Bang Theory fan. If you are not familiar with the show this is Howard. Howard is the king of cheesey pick up lines. So this was hugely funny to me. 

Tomorrow we are back in the Google trenches.

--- IT Girl 

Presenting........Google Presentation

I decided today I would create a Presentation using Google Presentation. So here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NoxnnVhMAe3ZYDHPIWWp82b1h45c9hJDjZJfwyf6sRg/pub?start=true&loop=true&delayms=5000

The content covers just the high points. If you can create a PowerPoint you can create a Presentation. Personally I prefer Microsoft PowerPoint but Google Presentation gets the job done. Maybe I just need more practice with Google.

By the way I used the Publish to Web option to share this with y'all.

See you tomorrow.

--- IT Girl