Google Team Drive
Last fall Google released Team Drive to G-Suite for Education. Many of you have already started using Team Drives, but if the Team Drive isn't on your radar already, watch this short video of the amazing features.
Team Drives are effiecient repositories for departments, grade levels, coaches, curriculum leads, office staff, campuses counselors, librarians, administrators, etc. If someone were to leave the district or move to another campus/grade level/department, staff can easily be added or removed from the Team Drive without moving the files.
The only thing that I have found that I don't like about Team Drives is that I can't drag/drop an entire folder to the Team Drive yet, which makes moving files time consuming. However, I think that in the long run, the ease of adding/deleting collaborators is going to make moving the files worth the effort.
If you want help getting started with Team Drives, please ask me about them when I'm on campuses this month.
BMS: January 11
BHS: January 17
AES: January 18
HCE: January 24
Destiny Collections to Improve Research Skills
The line between librarian and tech integration coordinator blurs quite often... and I love it when that happens!
If you've ever taken students to the computer lab to conduct research, you know that their first (and sometimes only) search tool is Google, and they'll often pick the first search result for their information. Retraining them to look for vetted resources can be a struggle. Using Follett Destiny Collections makes retraining students easy because we educators can give them a starting point.
The district libraries use Follett Destiny to manage our libraries, and Collections is part of the library's catalog. In collaborating with two teachers at BMS this week, we added books from the library, websites, database resources and ebooks, and even Google Documents to a Poetry Collection for English and and an Elements Collection for science classes.
The curated list gives younger students a starting point of vetted resources, many of which have citation tools already built in. The link to the Collection can be shared in Google Classroom, making sharing collections incredibly easy.
To access the collections, students and teachers will need to log into Destiny. See your campus librarian for login credentials. Each campus will handle Collections policies a little differently. If you are interested in beginning to build a Collection, contact your campus librarian.
Using Collections is new in BISD, so the librarians are on the same learning curve as teachers in using it for the first time. Consider trying Collections out.
Seasonal Wallpapers for Your Chromebook
Warning: Continue reading only if you, like me, get a little too excited about opening a new package of colored markers and starting a new planner every year. This tip is frivolous fun.
Thanks to one of the awesome BHS teachers, I've had a blast adding a seasonal wallpaper to my Chromebook.
Navigate to Smashing Magazines' wallpaper page. Click on the current month's featured article. Scroll down the page until you find an image you like. Download it. I used the 1024x768 size to completely fill the screen on my Chromebook.
Then open your Chrome settings, scroll down to Appearance and open the wallpaper app. Click on the + and add your image. It will be in your FILES folder under DOWNLOADS.
Add a fresh image/calendar each month to set the tone for the season.
