Google Apps Update Alert

New update information

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• End of support for Internet Explorer 9
• Calendar events that update when Google Groups change
• Domain-restricted Google+ communities

End of support for Internet Explorer 9 Posted: 05 Nov 2013 11:54 AM PST We would like to remind you of the Google Apps browser support policy, the set of guidelines for Google Apps services interoperability support. We support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available) as well as the current and prior major release of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version of one of these browsers is released, we begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version. Google’s test plans have been adjusted to now stop all testing and engineering work related to Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), as Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) was released on 17 October 2013. End users who access Gmail and other Google Apps services from an unsupported browser will be notified within the next few weeks through an in-product notification message or an interstitial pages with information about modern browsers and how to upgrade to them. Editions included:  Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government For more information: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864 whatsnew.googleapps.com Get these product update alerts by email Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Calendar events that update when Google Groups change Posted: 05 Nov 2013 11:52 AM PST Starting today when Google Calendar invitations are sent to members of a Google Group, the attendee list will automatically update as people join or leave the group. When you join a Google Group, you will be added to all of its meetings. And if you leave a group, those meetings will be removed from your calendar. Note that groups stop dynamically changing when the total number of guests in the event crosses 200. Release track:  Rapid Release Editions included:  Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government For more information: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2013/11/calendar-events-that-update-when-google.html https://support.google.com/a/answer/172013 whatsnew.googleapps.com Get these product update alerts by email Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Domain-restricted Google+ communities Posted: 05 Nov 2013 11:07 AM PST Starting today, new Google+ communities will be restricted to your domain by default if sharing is restricted in the Admin console. Posts in these communities are only viewable by people within the domain. However, you can still choose to create communities with people outside your organization so clients, agencies or business partners can join in. You can also make your community open to anyone at your domain or private, joinable by invitation only. Community owners can easily change settings, manage membership or invite other team members to join. Editions included:  Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government For more information: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2013/11/private-conversations-with-restricted.html https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3379754 https://support.google.com/a/answer/2677328 whatsnew.googleapps.com Get these product update alerts by email Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Gmail Black Menu Bar Replaced

Some of you looking for your Google Drive or Calendar link in Gmail may be asking "Who moved my cheese!?"  Rest assured it hasn't moved far.  The trusty links at the top of Gmail and other Google apps have moved to the app launcher.  You should find a 9 square of dots in the top right.  Click that and your links to Drive, Calendar, Google+, Contacts, etc. will drop down.  If you can't find the link you are looking for, click 'more' at the bottom of the drop down box or simply scroll your mouse wheel.

Live Streaming and Webcams

It was recently mentioned to me that Livestream now has a mobile app for iPads and such.  The question was, can we use this with the NRMPS Livestream accounts.  Well here's the email;

Chris,

I see from reviews that it appears we can generate livestream broadcasting on iPads.

Is that right?

Is it worth working on?

Do you recommend trying or recommend against trying to do so?

I found your instructions on shared Google Drive, but it starts with "buy a camera," which led to the above questions.

Thanks,

This seems to be a growing topic, so I thought it might be helpful to share my reply..

Keen,

The Livestream app is for personal Livestream accounts.  It will not work with our corporate account.

Staff are welcome to create a personal Livestream account and use the app, however I would strongly suggest Google Hangouts On Air instead.  It's free, they already have a Google account, and there are far more useful features with it over the Livestream product.

Here's my take on webcams listing them from worst to best;

• (Just okay to use) - Mobile devices including smart phones and iPads.  Generally the image quality while streaming on these devices is poor.  Sound is compromised by the placement and movement of your hand on the device.  If handheld, the image is shaky exasperating the already poor quality.
• (Better) - Built in webcams.  Usually the image quality is good.  Especially on newer laptops in the system such as the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.  Sound is good but you still need to be mindful of making noises near the mic with your hands. (Take off any wrist jewelry).  Video is good but still shaky if you are holding the laptop with your hand.
• (Very Good) - An HD External Webcam.  This is the preferred device for streaming.  The image quality is very good.  The sound quality is very good and in some cases in stereo.  It's portable and easy to use.  You're not tied down to your laptop or mobile device, in other words, you have more freedom to setup the camera any way you like.  Most models come with a threaded hole for mounting on a tripod or other standard camera mount.  << Very handy feature for the classroom >>

My personal suggestion is the Logitech c920, but any of the Logitech or Microsoft HD webcams would be a good choice.  If you're getting a lot of interest in streaming and you think it would be helpful, Jeff and I could put together a presentation on Google Hangouts On Air.  Just let us know.

Google Drive for Teachers with ‘How-to’ video links

Google has tripled free storage space, across Gmail, Google+ and Drive, bringing the total to 30GB. This is a serious move by Google as it places the company at the forefront of cloud based solutions with institutions working to tight financial constraints. Having turned to Google Drive as my main storage facility, I thought I would highlight some advantages of using the platform. (Please click on the links for further explanation.)

Google-drive-for-teachers-with-how-to-video-links

Gmail Tip: Clean out your Inbox by archiving old mail

Does your Inbox have more that 100 messages? 500 messages? Maybe even thousands? If so, you've got a case of Inbox Bloat! There’s really no reason to keep all that email in your Inbox. It’s much easier to archive your old messages.

Why? Archiving helps you:

• Better manage your Inbox by keeping it neat, tidy, and uncluttered.
• Reduce your stress level. Many people tend to feel overwhelmed when their Inbox is full of old messages. By reducing your Inbox to only new messages, or messages you need to deal with soon, your workload doesn't seem so insurmountable.
• Have a sense of accomplishment. Think about it - if your Inbox contained only a few messages, wouldn't you feel like you accomplished something?

Remember, you can always get back to any message you archived, either by going to your All Mail label or simply performing  a search. If you’re not sure how archiving works in Gmail, here’s some information that should help: What is archiving?

1. Search for old messages

So one tactic for cleaning out your Inbox is to get rid of all messages. To begin, see how many messages you currently have in your Inbox by looking at the top left of your message list. Looks like we have 228 messages!


Next, decide how old a message should be before you archive it. For our example, we’ll search for all messages in our Inbox that are older than 30 days. You can easily do this using keyword searches. To search for a specific date, enter before:yyyy/mm/dd as in before:2011/10/1. To concentrate only on messages in your Inbox, enter in:inbox. Our search would therefore look like this:

2. Archive the old messages

In the search results below, we see that 145 messages matched the search. To quickly archive all these messages:

1. Click the box to select all messages. This selects only messages in the current view, which here is only 20 messages. This would be ok if all messages returned from the search fit in this window. But since there are more messages than can be displayed...
2. Click Select all conversations that match this search to select the other messages, too.
3. Once all your results are selected, click the Archive button to move them to your archive.

3. Archive messages you’ve already read

Going back to your Inbox, you should now notice a lot fewer messages. That certainly seems more manageable! But, there are probably still messages you’ve already read that you might as well archive, too. To do that, let’s do another search - this time for all messages in your inbox (in:inbox) that you’ve already read (is:read). As such, your search would look like this:


When you get these results, perform the same steps as above to archive them.  (Remember to check the Select all conversations that match this search box, if you have more results than fit in the current view.)

There you are. Your Inbox is clean and tidy. Don’t you feel better? As you can see below, we were able to reduce our Inbox to 6 messages. Your results will, of course, vary.

One final tip: Archive as you go!

Finally, here’s a tip to help keep your Inbox from any future bloat. When you are replying to an email clicking Send & Archive sends your reply and automatically archives the message, all in one fell swoop! By contrast, clicking Send would simply send the message while the original would remain in your Inbox.

Email Tips: Clean Up Your Inbox with a Google Apps Script

Email is undoubtedly important—and at the same time, it can be a huge time drain depending on how much email you receive a day. And if your email inbox is anything like mine, well, it’s a jungle. Ready to tidy things up a bit? We stumbled on a Google Apps script that can help you better manage your Gmail inbox—no apps or extensions required.

We live our lives on a schedule (or try to, anyway)—so why not apply the same philosophy to your inbox? The Google Apps Script lets you automatically archive or delete old emails that are clogging up your inbox based on a schedule you create. The result? Time-based events that will move, mark or label messages—and you don’t even have to open your mail client!

I can hear your excitement. You’re ready to set it up, aren’t you? Let’s dive in with a hypothetical example. Say you want to get rid of deals, promotional emails or notifications that are two days old. To accomplish this, you’ll need to follow two steps:

1. Create a “delete me” Gmail filter and populate the search options to catch your semi-spam as it arrives.
2. Create a script that will delete all messages from the “delete me” label older than two days.  Once your filter has been created, go to https://script.google.com and create a blank project. You’ll enter the following code, as written on John Day’s blog–head there to copy and paste the script.

Notice that, in the second line, you have the option to change the number of delay variables to specify how many days should pass before that particular matched message will be deleted from your inbox.

When you’ve filled in the variables, save the script, name your project and click Run. After that, Google will ask you to authorize the script to access your Gmail account. Your final step is the schedule the interval at which you want the script to run. Simply go to the Resources menu and select your desired interval.

Now that you’ve cleaned up older emails, what about the rest of your inbox? Don’t worry—there’s a script for that! You can easily archive older emails from your inbox using the Google Script here:

https://script.google.com/d/1FqkoGz0qhBxBfu2dbJMGL8yo-larautrN7ASJLHrGTxqkQtQNPEDX7CH/edit?usp=sharing

Simply copy and paste the script into https://script.google.com, specify your intervals and you’re set!

A quick note? If you want to clean up thousands of email messages, know that it will take time for the script to fully work. If you’d rather tackle your inbox in smaller batches, follow John’s steps to process email threads in groups of 100.

What do you think? Ready to give Google Apps Script a try? 

Research Without Leaving Your Document

Google Research Tool

The Research tool makes it easy to add information from the web to your documents and presentations. To access the tool:

• Select the Research option from the Tools menu.
• Use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + ⌘ + Shift + I on a Mac, Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Ion a PC).
• Right-click on a specific word and select 

Research.The Research tool will appear along the right-hand side of your document or presentation. You can start a search by typing into the search bar. You can narrow your search to specific types of results (e.g. images, quotations) by using the drop-down menu in the search bar.

Researching different types of information relevant to your document or presentation

When conducting a search, the Research tool will show you different types of results — web results, images, quotations, maps, reviews, personal results, and more.

Web Results

Under the web results category, you’ll find a number of websites related to your search. If you select one of these results, you’ll see several options:

• Select Preview to see a preview of the website. Click on the site link at the top of the preview pane to open this page in a separate window, or click the arrow on the left edge to close the preview.
• Select Insert link to add a link to the website into the body of your document.
• Select Cite to create a footnote citation of this web result within the body of your document.

Images

Images will appear in the general search, as well as an image search. Narrow your search results to only images by selecting “Images” from the drop-down menu in the search bar.

Quotations

Narrow your search results to only quotations by selecting “Quotes” from the drop-down menu in the search bar. Once you have selected the quotation you’d like to use in your document, click Insert to add it to your document with a footnote citation (or linked to the author’s name in a presentation).

Article Citations

Narrow your search results to only articles by selecting “Scholar” from the drop-down menu in the search bar. Once you have selected an article you’d like to read or reference, click on that entry in the search results. You will see a Web or PDF hyperlink in the upper left-hand corner of the entry that will take you to a web or PDF version of the article itself. You will see a Cited by hyperlink in the upper right-hand corner of the entry, showing how many times the article has been cited, that will direct you to the Google Scholar list of sources that have cited this article. Clicking on either of these links will open the result in another window.
To insert an article citation into your document, select the article and click Cite. In presentations, you may insert a link to the article by pressing Insert.

Places

When conducting a search in the Research tool for a geographic location, your search results may include a map. You can edit this map by selecting Edit and then zooming in/out or dragging the map. Once you have the exact map image you’d like to include in your document, click Insert. You can also drag and drop the map image into your document.

Dictionary

Use the Research tool's dictionary to search for definitions, synonyms, and usage examples. If you don't already have the Research tool open, you can access the dictionary by clicking the Tools menu and then selecting Define.

Links to short video tutorials:

Using Google docs for easy Research
from Kirk Magill on Vimeo

Google Docs "Research Tool"
by gogrovo on YouTube


Google Docs "Research Tool"
on Grovo.com

Tomorrow's Tech in Today's Schools: Google + Classrooms

Tomorrow's Tech in Today's Schools: Google + Classrooms: A year and half ago, Google released Google+ to a select few power-users and slowly opened up to the public.  It was called many names and...

Grovo - Great Online Training Videos

If you have every wanted to call your favorite "Tech Guy" because you needed to quickly find out how to use that awesome new online or cloud based service.......

Then you need to check out Grovo!  It is by far my favorite place to find high quality online training (If you can call learning it in 3 minutes flat training) with real-time video updates to the websites, mobile apps and online tools that I use the most!  AND IT'S FREE!!!

Check it out and sign up today!  Grovo | Online Training and Video Tutorials

Check how this teacher used Grovo in her class and "Students' grades improved as much as 25%"

Use Google+ Hangouts on the iPad

Google+ hangouts on the iPad are a great way to video chat with students, staff and even other classrooms!  Download the Google+ iPad app to start hanging out!  Google Hangouts are a central part of the Google+ social network, allowing up to 10 users to video chat across devices and notebooks, without the single participant and Apple only restrictions of FaceTime.  

Want to learn more on how to use Google+ Hangouts on the iPad

Gmail - Using filtered Search

Use Filtered Search
Gmail’s search bar is very handy for finding that message you got months ago, but most people don’t realize how easy it is to access advanced search. Just click the downward facing arrow on the right-hand side of the search bar and you will be presented with a number of different search options. You can narrow your search down to the person who sent it, the subject, words used, and the dates it would have been sent.  Learn more about Gmail search

Google Drive iOS app

Upload photos faster and get more done with the Google Drive iOS app

The Drive iOS app recently got some updates to help you save time and get work done. You can now quickly upload multiple photos and videos from your last conference or team event into Google Drive to share with your team. Learn more: http://goo.gl/yJsc6

Drive on iPad is now integrated with Quickoffice to make it easy to edit Microsoft Office files you’ve stored in Drive. Simply open your Microsoft Office files in Drive, edit them using Quickoffice, and save them back to Drive.

Other new features in this release include:
+ Diagonal scroll in Sheets
+ Improved formatting in Google Sheets for decimals, currency, dates and more
+ Improvements to slideshow and animations in Slides
+ Pinch to zoom on Slides

Download Google Drive for iOS: http://goo.gl/5Zgc3
Download Quickoffice for Google App for Business: http://goo.gl/3DZ8b

Google Forms are Addictive

For a few days now I've been trying to write a blog on the wonders of using Google forms in the classroom and find myself so overwhelmed with ideas that it quickly becomes too much for a simple blog.  So my goal is to introduce you to the simplicity of forms and to spark your imaginations with endless ways to use them.

The short and sweet of using forms is this; if you want to collect information, no matter how simple or complicated the subject matter, a form will gather, verify, organize and report... instantly.

"Sounds great, but how many hours will it take me to learn and create a form?  I just don't have time to learn something new when what I've always done is working fine."

Oh the fear and struggle of something new.  Now I know when I say something is really easy the first thought that runs through some of your minds is; "Sure it's easy for you.  You do this tech stuff all the time." and there is some truth in that.  However, SERIOUSLY, this is so easy I guarantee when you're done you will be asking "Is that it???"

I have a few forms I interact with daily at NRMPS.  Many of you have used them and may not have realized it was a simple Google form.

With Google Docs, you can quickly create a form or survey, send it to students, parents, teachers, or staff, and keep track of the answers in one spreadsheet.

Since forms are filled out online, there’s no need to enter in results manually. Responses are collected and displayed immediately in a corresponding Google Docs spreadsheet which allows you to sort, analyze, and visualize the information.

You can send forms to anyone - even those outside of the NRMPS system. Respondants can access the form via email, a published webpage, or embedded on a site.  Forms also generates an automatic summary with charts, graphs, and statistics about your form responses and can notify you when new responses are submitted.

Here are some live examples of forms you can preview and try:

• Collecting mailing addresses
• US History pop quiz for grade school
• Student group welcome form
• Club event requests

And other ideas that could be conducted using forms:

• Structured peer editing and feedback
• Assignment checklist and submissions
• Applications for positions in clubs, students, government
• Peer evaluation
• Formative assessment
• Book Reviews
• Survey before and after a lesson/discussion
• Collect science data
• Organize groups
• Volunteer opportunities
• Student feedback
• Online reading record
• Find out more about your students' interests

"So let me at it!  Where do I start?"

Here are links to easy instructions for creating froms.

• Create and Customize Forms
• Create a Form - Grovo.com - 1:30 video.  Quick and easy for attention deficit folks like me :)  You will need to create a Grovo account if you don't already have one.  HIGHLY recommended.  Grovo is awesome.
• Create a Google Form

Voicemail Available For All NRMPS Staff

Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones -- a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers' experience, and more.

Google Voice isn't a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There's nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don't have to make or take calls using a computer.

Google Voice will let you define which phones ring, based on who's calling, and even let you listen in on voicemail before answering the call. We use smart technology to route your calls. So, if you're already on a Google Voice call, we'll recognize it and use call waiting to reach you on the phone you're on.

Anyone with @nrms.k12.nc.us email address and has a VOIP phone in their classroom or office can have free voicemail using Google Voice.

With Google Voice, the voicemail will be transcribed and sent to your email account where you can listen to the message.  If needed, you can forward the voicemail to anyone needing to see or hear it.  This works great at the front desk (main number) of the school.

Click here to set up your NRMPS Google Voice account.

Google Drive - Folder View

Here's a quick tip to open up an entire folder in your Drive and jump through its contents while previewing each item: (example below)

Click on the arrow next to My Drive in the left-hand navigation of your Google Drive on the web to display a list of your folders. Then, right-click the folder and select Open from the drop-down menu. A recent update to this feature makes it easier to navigate through your entire folder hierarchy, too.