Discover tips, tools, and resources for using Chromebooks in education. Enhance learning and productivity with strategies tailored for classrooms.
Let’s all wish Gmail a happy 14th birthday! It had its public debut on April Fool’s day in 2004. Thanks to all of its users, the launch was no joke. There are now more than one billion Gmail accounts. Because it forms such a basic but important function in our daily lives, it is easy for us to take for granted some of the functionality that can really help us organize our work. Let’s take a look at some of the features that aren’t new, but you may not be using. It’s time to spice up your Gmail use with a little organizational Google SALSA: Searching – All Mail – Labels – Archiving – Stars.
Searching
If there is anything Google is known for, it is their search engine. One of my favorite features of Gmail is the ability to use search terms to help locate an email. I must confess that I’m a pack rat and keep far more emails than I should, but it is easy for me to find what I need by using a few Gmail search operators.
The formula to remember is to use the search operator followed with a colon and then insert the term you are searching for. For instance, if I want to find an email from a specific someone, then I type in the following:
From:friend@tcea.org
If that doesn’t narrow down the search, I might add a few more operators to my search. For instance, if I want to find an email from someone that has a PDF attachment, I could search using this formula: from:friend@tcea.org has:attachment filename:pdf
I could also search for an email sent or received during a certain period of time using the following terms:
- after:
- before:
- older:
- newer:
Example: after:2004/04/16 (Make sure you follow this pattern. Start with the year.)
Example: before:2004/04/18
Afraid you won’t remember the terms and don’t want to look them up? Google has a built-in search feature with some of their more basic ways to search for an email. Click on the arrow pointing down to display the search fields. Then insert the words that will help you find the email you are looking for.
All Mail and Archiving
Understanding the terms Gmail uses to identify where your email is stored is critical if you want to efficiently handle your 
email. Your inbox is what you see when you open up your email. You can remove an email from your inbox, but not delete it from your account. This way you can declutter your inbox but still keep important or useful emails. You do this by archiving the email which removes it from your inbox and places it in your All Mail. The easiest way to archive an email is to open the email and then click on the icon that looks like a folder with a downward pointing arrow. This is called archiving.
Labeling
Gmail uses labels to sort your emails instead of folders. Labels provide the user with more flexibility because an email in Gmail can be given countless labels; but in a system that uses folders, the email can only go into one folder. Think of labels as a tag. In essence, you use labels as a way to identify emails by a tag which makes it easy to search for them.
Creating a Label
The easiest way to create a label or to label an email is when you have an email open. See directions below.
Assigning a Label
Assigning a label is easy. In the inbox view, you can drag and drop a label onto the email you want to tag, or when the email is open, click on the icon of a label and assign it a label.
Stars
Stars are made for those who like to organize using color and/or symbols. The default ‘star’ is well…a star. But you can change the color of the star or select another symbol by clicking through the stars in your inbox. But the fun doesn’t stop there. Google lets you control what order the stars or symbols appear and which ones are included in the rotation. In order to change the order in which the “stars” appear and which ones you want to use, you need to go into your General Settings of Gmail.
Drag the stars between the lists. They will rotate in the order shown below when you click successively.
To learn the name of a star for search purposes, hover your mouse over the image in your settings or in your Inbox. For instance, the yellow star is called yellow-star, and the red exclamation mark is called red-bang. To find all of the emails you have labeled with a red exclamation mark, your search would look like this: has:red-bang. If you ask me, the Stars put the kick in the Google SALSA!
Master Chefs Know to Include SALSA
Learning to master some of the basic skills of Google’s email application will enable you to spice up your Gmail experience. Adding a little spoonful of searching, labeling, colorful stars, and archiving emails into your All Mail will ensure that you master your email rather than it mastering you. Go ahead, enjoy your SALSA!
Photo Credit: Salsa – Marco Verch using CC Attribution 2.0 Generic License
Do you teach any of the Technology Applications or Career and Technology Education courses where students learn to use Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, Premiere, etc.? Or do you want to enhance your creative Adobe skills for personal projects and enjoyment? If either of those are true, then you definitely want to attend the Adobe Academy on June 19-20! Besides networking with other creative educators, you’ll have concurrent sessions to choose from in order to gain fresh ideas, polish your Adobe skills, and take your curriculum to the next level. You’ll learn from other Adobe-using educators in this hands-on event. For more information about this academy go to 
If you are one of the many Microsoft-using educators, you will find the Microsoft Academy a perfect fit. On July 12-13, you can experience a wide array of Microsoft tools to help you extend your learning and gain fresh ideas of how to use the tools with your students and fellow educators. Whether you are using Office365 in the cloud or are using a not-quite-so-new version, join in on the active sessions and take away new ideas. For more information about this academy go to 
Calling all Googlers! Learn from some of the Googliest educators around at our interactive Chromebook Academy on July 26-27. There will be great sessions for Google Suite administrators as well as for teachers integrating Google Suite in their classroom. You’ll learn about the most current features and how you can use them to maximize your impact with students. Add-ons, scripts, hyperdocs, Slides, Forms, and more will be explored so that you can get what you need to take your students to the next level! To learn more about the Chromebook Academy, go to 
With all of the amazing information that’s currently available to each of us on the internet, it can sometimes be very hard to find the real gems. To assist with that, I’d like to share what tens of thousands of educational blog readers thought was most valuable via our Top 20 Blog Posts list. See if any of these resources resonate with you!
The teacher or Google administrator gives the students access to the Story Speaker add-on. Students go into Google Docs and select the Add-ons menu and choose Story Speaker — Open Story Speaker. They then write a story in Google Docs either on their own or using one of the two provided templates: Basic or Advanced (more about the templates below). The final step is to click Play Your Story and the story will be read by the Google Home. You can even export the story and save it to a class website or email to parents to listen to on their own Google Home or on Google Assistant on a smartphone. You can watch a short two-minute video to get the idea 
listener must say in order for the story to move forward. Students can begin to learn about basic if/then statements in code and how to predict outcomes. They must think like the listener as they predict what words he/she might say in response to the story. And they must follow logical, branching concepts, all without realizing that they are doing it. In addition, students can put notes to themselves in bold in the writing, much like programmers do, as bold text is not read out loud.
