Goo.gl, Google Drawings, Social Media, Privacy

Goo.gl is being retired

If you have been using the URL shortener goo.gl, you will need to find an alternative, as Google is retiring that tool. 

See Brenham ISD's post or Free Technology for Teachers post for several good alternatives.

Insert Diagrams Into Drawings

Looking for a quick and easy way for your students to take notes, show understanding, or process learning? Consider using Google Drawings.

Last week during one of the BHS PLC meetings, I learned that diagrams can be inserted into Google Drawings. Just open the drawing tool, click Insert, and select Diagram. There are a variety of diagrams including grids, hierarchies, timelines, processes, relationships, and cycles. The Drawings can be shared just like any other G-Suite document or they can be downloaded as a .pdf or .jpg.

If you have teens or teach teens...

With social media in the news this week, now is a great time to review privacy settings on devices with your students or children. The topic became personal this weekend when I received a Snap from my teenage niece. Her location was tagged. Needless to say, this aunt's alarm bells sounded. It was a great reminder that we need to help our kids navigate privacy settings on their devices and apps.

What's a parent/teacher to do? Common Sense Media, a national nonprofit that aims to provide trustworthy information to help families navigate 21st century tools, offers some great suggestions for adjusting location and other settings.  This link addresses the safety of teens using location apps, and this link offers suggestions for privacy settings for computers and smartphones. My top two suggestions to my niece? Turn off geotagging on photos and restrict location settings on apps.

Turn off geotagging of photos on devices

Restrict location settings on apps

Use Google Forms for Documentation, URL shorteners, EDU in 90

Using Google Forms for Documentation 

As a former English teacher, I love the blog  Two Writing Teachers. It's chock full of awesome ideas to engage and monitor student writers, and it provides great micro-doses of professional development for writing teachers, too. Last month, one of the posts featured using a Google Form to document writing progress. Wow! Wish I'd had that tool when I was in the English classroom. 

But you don't have to be a writing teacher to see the infinite possibilities in the use of forms to track student progress. The concept introduced in the post is universal.

If you need to keep track of a student's progress, check out this post to see how a simple Google Form can streamline your workflow and make filling out that progress monitoring paperwork a whole lot easier. 

Coaches, need to keep track of workout stats? Let Google Forms do it for you.

 

Need to get everyone on the same page quickly? Use a URL shortener.

Sometimes you don't have the luxury of posting a link to a site on your webpage or in your Google Classroom, but you need everyone in your audience to navigate to that site quickly and easily. Enter the URL shortener. Basically, you copy the link address to the shortener to generate a URL that your audience can easily type into the browser on their device.

A URL shortener will make something like this:
 https://twowritingteachers.org/2017/08/14/ideas-for-getting-started-with-google-forms/

look like this:
http://tinyurl.com/y7lsyeeq

Here are a few shorteners to get you started. If you want to know more, see LifeWire's post to learn about the unique features of each.


goo.gl
bit.ly
ow.ly
tinyurl.com

Stay up-to-date with Google tools with EDU in 90

 

Google recently launched EDU in 90, which will feature bi-weekly 90 second videos to keep teachers up-to-date with new Google tools and offer ideas for using them in the classroom.  Ninety seconds every two weeks to keep on top of things? Sounds awesome! Check out the Edu in 90 channel and click Subscribe.