Here are some highlights from the latest newsletter for your consideration.
Educator Resources
Celebrate Women’s History Month with Applied Digital Skills
Looking to celebrate Women’s History Month with your class? Our new lesson ‘Celebrate Your Accomplishments with Google Docs’ has students explore the accomplishments of a woman they admire and practice talking about those achievements with a partner. [Contents of both lessons are in the Creative Commons and can be reworked to put up in your Canvas]
Women of Color in Tech Scholarship
We’d like to invite you to apply to the new ‘Women of Color in Tech’ scholarship, providing twenty $10K scholarships to women studying computer science and related fields. Please encourage high school seniors or undergraduate Black, Latina, and/or Native women currently pursuing or who have completed computing related degrees to apply.
Extra Credit
Register for the Teach with Chrome Series
Learn about the latest in Chrome devices and Chrome OS with more than ten 30-minute sessions featuring Google experts and partners running demo-based trainings. If you can’t watch live, all sessions will be available on demand after the livestream finishes each day.
Arts & Culture: Women in Culture
To celebrate Women’s History Month, help honor women in engineering, chemistry, natural history, space, and medicine. Discover the lives of the women in STEM and politics, art, and sports through stories, lesson plans, videos, and virtual tours.
Arts & Culture: Mali Magic
Discover the four Ms of Mali; Manuscripts, Music, Monuments and Modern Art. Take a virtual tour of the great Mosque of Djenne, discover traditional instruments, read the Timbuktu manuscripts, or use the lesson plan to guide students through Mali’s magic.
In the latest update for Chrome, you’ll now see a share icon in the link address bar. Click that “sharrow” and you be able to copy the link or get a QR code with a few less clicks.
Go Pageless in Google Docs
More and more teachers are going “paperless” in their classrooms. As a result, you might not like making formatting adjustments when an image, table, or something else falls right around a page break. Google Docs now gives you the option to “pageless.” View the video below to find out how and see why it might be helpful.
Here are some highlights from the latest newsletter for your consideration.
Originality Reports Available for Google Slides
Previously available for Google Docs, originality reports can now also be run in Google Slides. Originality reports are a feature that helps students and teachers detect plagiarism and can be used when submitting or receiving files in Google Classroom.
Register for the Teach with Chrome Series
Learn about the latest in Chrome devices and Chrome OS with more than ten 30-minute sessions featuring Google experts and partners running demo-based trainings. If you can’t watch live, all sessions will be available on demand after the livestream finishes each day.
Educator Resources
Join a Google Educator Group
Find a Google Educator Group near you and meet educators in your area who use Google tools to foster learning in schools, classrooms, and communities.
Earn Your Educator Level 1 Certification
Demonstrate your mastery of Google tools in the classroom with the Educator Level 1 Certification. Completing the certification earns you a badge that can help you stand out on your resume, portfolio, website, and more.
New Black History Month Lesson from Applied Digital Skills
Our new lesson ‘Create a Community My Map’ promotes student cultural awareness and activism. In this lesson, students will customize a ‘Google My Map’ that features places that are meaningful to them in their community and share it with their peers.
Extra Credit
Apply to be a Google Certified Trainer
Apply to be a Google Certified Trainer today and connect with other passionate educators! As a trainer, you’ll foster change and efficiency in the educator community by helping educators use Google Workspace tools in their classrooms.
Register for a Google for Education Security Summit
Our virtual Security Summits focus on best practices to safely and securely manage your school’s online presence. We’ll explore our powerful, free security tools (DLP, Vault) and get hands-on with hero features (Investigation Tool, etc.) from our paid Workspace editions.
Arts & Culture: Memory of the World
Discover some of the world’s most significant items of documentary heritage through the UNESCO program. Educational resources including video, a lesson plan for K-12, and an introduction for teachers are available.
Arts & Culture: A Brief History of Vaccines
Find out about the discovery of viruses and history of vaccines. Check out videos, stories, quizzes, and insights into people who help save lives and the design of protective equipment.
Arts & Culture: Thai Art History
Explore 70 years of Thai art through color, high res images, interviews with artists, and different materials. Find inspiration and insight into the culture and art of Thailand.
There is a new option for your screen when working in Google Slides. You can view or hide the filmstrip. What’s filmstrip? It is the vertical display of slides to the left of the slide your are working on.
Take a Look at the Difference
Why would you want to use this feature?
👉🏽 You are presenting, but still want to be able to edit on the slide, this gives you more space
👉🏽You have a drag and drop activity for students, you can utilize more of the gray area on the sides
👉🏽 You want to keep upcoming slides hidden
Interested in drag and drop activities for Google Slides? Check out these resources:
As we approach the end of the semester, you might consider some new ideas for end-of-semester final projects. Matt Miller, the founder of Ditch that Textbook posted a few great ideas on his blog. Ideas include creating a series of podcast, producing an unboxing video, and connecting with a cause. Read more about his ideas here: https://ditchthattextbook.com/10-ideas-for-digital-end-of-semester-final-projects/
You many not be looking for end-of-the-semester activities, but perhaps you are looking for activities that will engage students as we move toward Winter Break. Eric Curts, of Control Alt Achieve, has put together a collection of “googley” wintertime activities that will allow students to be creative and practice some content skills. Check out his great templates here: https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2021/12/winter.html
Time Saving Tip: Many students and teachers end up accessing Google tools from their phones. As a result, most of us are logged into multiple Google accounts on our phones. Up until last week, I would click on my avatar in the upper, right corner and then select the account I wanted to switch to. But did you know you can save a few nano-seconds by just swiping up or down on that avatar and Google will switch between your accounts? This works in Google Mail (Gmail), Google Drive, Google Keep, Jamboard, Slides, and Docs. It works in most of the Google apps except for Calendar. Video Demonstration.
You can now mark a paragraph to always begin on a new page with the new “Add page break before” option in Google Docs. This is particularly useful if you want certain paragraph styles to always create a new page such as titles, subtitles, or headings. This also means that you can import and export Microsoft Word and other third-party documents that have “Page break before” applied to paragraphs and Docs will retain that formatting.
Add the new “Add page break before” paragraph style in Docs
Starting December 1, 2021: owners and collaborators of classic Google sites will no longer be able to edit any remaining classic Google Sites in our domain. Starting January 1, 2022: classic Google Sites will no longer be viewable unless they are converted to new Google Sites. If you own a classic Google site in our domain and wish to have your content remain viewable after January 1st, at some point before the new year browse to https://sites.google.com/classicsitesmanager and initiate the conversion process.
In some cases we note there are some teacher sites that receive hundreds of views a month even though they haven’t been edited in a year or more, so will suggest you review your site’s stats before possibly deciding to skip converting it. For those with lots of page views on dated sites, if you decide to convert to permit continued visitor access, you may want to at least edit your site by adding links for visitors to follow to also access content you are now more involved in curating on Canvas or elsewhere.
Every month tweaks and changes occur in one or more of our Google apps. Here are two of this month’s.
Create meeting notes in Google Calendar. Available starting in late October, quickly start and share a meeting notes document for your Calendar events.
Add image watermarks in Google Docs. You can now add image watermarks directly into Google Docs.
The TextHelp PDF Reader has officially been reborn as OrbitNote!
Earlier this summer, the Texthelp PDF Reader was updated and became OrbitNote. This update included a new look & easier onboarding. P-CCS students & staff have access to all the PREMIUM features of OrbitNote detailed below.
If you’re not familiar with it yet, OrbitNote allows staff & students to transform and interact with PDFs and digital documents in a completely different way. It helps to create an accessible, dynamic and collaborative space that works for everyone.
You & your students can use OrbitNote to:
-Collaborate in real-time within digital documents
-Read text, including math & science equations, aloud with easy-to-follow dual color highlighting
-Type text on top of your PDFs with the Text feature
-Highlight and extract information with colored highlighters
-Add text and voice comments or use pushpins for helpful hints or instructions
-Use freehand or shape drawing to scribble and draw on your digital documents
And more!
There is NO ACTION required for students or staff who were already using the PDF Reader; the new OrbitNote extension auto-updated. Students and staff may have to update permissions with the first use of the new tool.
Staff who have not used the Texthelp PDF Reader in the past will need to install the extension here.
For more information about using OrbitNote, including Canvas LMS integration, go to the RW4G@PCCS website: https://bit.ly/PCCS-OrbitNote
The new OrbitNote Quick Reference Guide is available here.
Why would you want to use this feature?
