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Google Tips and Tricks

Five Hacks for Google Forms

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Do you use Google Forms? Every educator I know relies on Google Forms in some way for projects or assignments. You can see a list of handy ideas about using Google Forms in the classroom online. At the TCEA Campus Technology Specialist Academy, Dr. Bruce Ellis amazed participants as he shared several “game-changer” add-ons for Google Forms. In this blog entry, let’s take a look at five Google Forms hacks you may find useful. These may make your Forms experience more impactful.

Note: Follow @DrBruceEllis for more great tips on using G Suite for Education tools. Be sure to check out the TCEA TechNotes blog as well.

You may know how to create forms. The process can be as simple as going to Google Forms website. Once there, you can use existing templates or make your own.

If you go to the Template Gallery, you can add your own templates for others in your organization to find and use. Still need to find examples of Forms? Consider the pro tip below:

Pro Tip: Use the Google search engine to help you find Forms. You can enter your search terms AND site:https://docs.google.com/forms

A search would look like this:

checklist site:https://docs.google.com/forms

Did you know that you can do so much more with Google Forms? Let’s explore these five hacks.

Hack #1 – Creating Pre-Filled Forms

Having a pre-filled form can make a big difference for folks who must fill out a form quickly. Pre-filled forms assist in increasing the completion rate of a form. Ready to give it a try? Follow these steps:

  1. Create a one-question form.
  2. Click the gear icon. Select Get pre-filled link option.
  3. Fill in and complete as needed.
  4. Click the Get Link button.

You now will have a pre-filled form that respondents can finish off in a quick manner.

Hack #2 – Adding Add-Ons

What makes G Suites tools so excellent is how many add-ons are available. You can find a list of some of my favorite add-ons in this blog entry, Five Hacks for Google Sheets. Add-ons are easy to incorporate into Google Sheets. What some are unaware of is that Google Forms has add-ons as well. To access them, click on the jigsaw puzzle piece in the top right-hand corner of your Google Form screen, as shown.

hacks forms

You can access more add-ons, too. Click on the “skinny snowman,” that column of three dots between the SEND button and your profile picture. You will see the MORE ADD-ONS option in the menu that appears.

As you can see, there are several available. Let’s take a look at a few.

Hack #3 – Certify’em

Wish you could create online certifications and email custom certificates to students and staff who finish an exam? Then the Certify’em add-on is for you.  Certify’em describes itself in this way:

Do you need to test and track knowledge or proficiency with employees, team members, students, or customers? Do you need to provide proof of certification for people in your school, club, sports team, store, or office? Now there’s a simple and easy way! Don’t be uncertain about peoples’ knowledge… instead, Certify’em!

Here’s what Certify’em comes with, all for free:

  • Professionally-designed certificate templates
  • Ability to create your own using Google Slides
  • Ability to issue participants their own personalized copy as a PDF email attachment
  • Each certificate comes with a unique serial number
  • Tracking spreadsheet that Certify’em creates and maintains for you

Give it a try.

Hack #4 – Advanced Summary

Have you heard of Awesome Table add-on? It makes it easy to display the content of a Google Sheet. Working with records in a Google Sheet can be cumbersome. Instead, Awesome Table transforms your Sheet of columns and rows into various views. View types include simple tables, directories, Gantt chart views, Google maps, card views, and more. It even comes with a template gallery to get you started.

forms

 

 

 

 

But, wait. I bet you’re wondering where Advanced Summary hack comes into play. Advanced Summary, a complementary add-on, takes advantage of Awesome Table.

Advanced Summary “generates charts and filters based on a Google Form responses.” It makes it possible to isolate and analyze any subset of data collected via Forms. You can then show charts of that data subset.

Hack #5 – Form Approvals

“A workflow signifies a series of tasks that, when completed in a certain order, achieves a specific outcome,” says Tina Eaton. She asserts that “disjointed forms…prove to be the inefficient, expensive, and time-draining.” You can create a workflow using the Google Forms add-on, Form Approvals. With Form Approvals, you can do the following:

  • Set sequential or parallel approvals
  • Add static or dynamic approvers
  • Set routing conditions using logic
  • Set up one-click approvals from email
  • Approve and track requests on the go (online) or mobile with responsive web design

The pricing chart highlights available features:

forms

As of December 1, 2018, Form Approvals will cost money. That said, organizations may find this a less expensive solution than other commercial ones on the market. Looking for education pricing? Note this response in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of their website: “The majority of our users are from education and non-profit organisations. With this in mind, we have priced the application as low as we possibly can.”

Bonus Hack: Digital Badges

“Wouldn’t it be neat if we could offer digital badges to workshop and webinar participants?” I asked a colleague not too long ago. G Suites add-ons to popular tools like Forms and Sheets make that possible for small organizations. For example, Digital Badges add-on relies on images in your Google Drive so that you can then assign the badges to students.

Did You Know?

Open Badges is a standard for digital credentials originally developed by Mozilla and now embraced by IMS Global. It’s now a popular and widely-adopted standard used by many organisations involved in skills, education and training. Learn more.

Another add-on, Open Badges, makes it easy to use Google Form submissions. These submissions turn into digital badges. Wondering how it works? A student fills out a form. The form is submitted when a task is done. The Openbadges.me uses the data submitted and matches it against the badge’s criteria. If the submission meets the criteria, then the submitter receives the badge.

Five Hacks for Google Forms

Adopt these hacks to step up your work with Google Forms. You will be able to get more done and collaborate with others in new ways.

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Google Tips and Tricks

Five Hacks for Google Sheets

by Diana Benner
written by Diana Benner

Do you create Google Sheets? In our office, many use Google Sheets for a multitude of projects. At a recent Google Educator Level 1 training, participants were unaware of my top five hacks for Google Sheets.  Let’s take a look at five Google Sheets hacks you may find useful.  Depending on your needs, these can make your Sheets experience more productive.

Hack #1 – Flippity.net

“Have you explored Flippity.net?” I asked session participants. Almost all shook their heads in the negative. Flippity takes data you have in your Google Sheet and then does cool stuff with it.

Note: With each Sheet, you will must go to File->Publish the sheet. This make its available on the web for viewing. When you get it setup, you will copy the Flippity.net website address (URL) (shown in blue in the image below) then share that with students or staff.

Here are some of the problems that the free Flippity website helps you solve as an educator:

  • Flashcards – Take content in a Google Sheet and turn it into online flashcards. You create two columns in a Sheet, putting side one (the prompt) of the flashcard in column one. In column two, you put side two content (the response). With this option, you can also generate more resources. Those include a simple list, practice, matching, and word cloud. Flippity makes it easy to send your list of data to create Bingo cards, Crossword, and even Hangman. It can generate a Memory Game, Word Search, and Print Quiz.
  • Quiz Show – Want to create your own trivia game a la a Jeopardy show? Flippity makes that easy.
  • Random Name Picker – Need a random name picker for selecting students for projects? This tool will use your class roster to make it happen.
  • Scavenger Hunt – Turn any Sheet into a scavenger hunt activity.

More creations that Flippity makes possible include Timeline maker tool. You can use its Badge Tracker, Spelling Word Manager, and Word Search tools, too. MadLibs, Mix and Match, and Certificate Quiz appear, too. Ready to get started? Go to Flippity’s website and follow the instructions that go with each tool.

Hack #2 – RosterSync

This free add-on to Google Sheets makes it easy to create and update Google Classroom. With RosterSync Teacher Edition, you can sync a copy of a Google Classroom course roster. Student names and email addresses get saved to Sheets. Why is this important? It makes getting at data saved in Classrooms easier to use elsewhere. Once you have that class roster of students, you can use other add-ons (like Flippity) to do more.

Hack #3 – Save Email and Attachments

Get a lot of emails with attached files? Use this add-on to Google Sheets to create a custom filter. This add-on will save file attachments from selected incoming email as PDF files. You can create a “rule” that has two options. The options include save the email body (the contents) and file attachments. Here is what one query looks like:

Query:

label:All from:SOMEONE@tcea.org has:attachment

More options are available in the premium version ($29 per year). Those options include:

  • Unlimited rules for saving emails and attachments to:
    • Google Drive
    • Google Team Drive folders
  • Faster save rate (every 15 minutes), which is great if you have tons of incoming email
  • Custom file names
  • Permit or deny file attachments that have specific extensions (e.g. EXEs to avoid potential virus carriers)
  • Remove watermark in generated PDF files

The free version can get you started. Want to learn more? Watch this short video. An alternative solution is CloudHQ.net’s Save Emails to Google Drive add-on. CloudHQ’s version lets you save one hundred emails to Google Drive for free. They feature another add-on, Save and Backup My Emails, that will backup all emails and files.

Hack #4 – Power Tools

Feature-rich, this add-on offers rich variety of tools you can use to manage your data in a spreadsheet.  If you have three minutes, you may want to watch this video overview. Some of the tools in this must-have tool for Sheets include:

  • Change case (e.g. capital, lowercase)
  • Sum colored cells
  • Remove duplicates and compare two or more columns
  • Split, merge, compare, find data
  • Unpivot tables, unmerge cells
  • Autosum numbers in every row or column
  • Add or remove text by position
  • Transform formulas
  • Change formula reference types
  • Delete unwanted characters
  • Merge sheets
  • Randomize data

Power Tools offers a helpful toolbar that provides one-click actions (like those listed above). The Power Tools add-on is one of my top hacks for Google Sheets. I expect it will soon become yours.

Hack #5 – Bulk Email Tools

Have you collected students’ parent names and emails via a Google Form? Make it easy to stay in contact with custom updates to parents. Send a clickable email (instead of paper) that parents will be able to interact with. Need to send a standard email to workshop participants? You can do this with one or both of these two bulk email tools:

My favorite uses of these tools include emailing:

  • Parents with student-specific information that is not FERPA related
  • Students (in older grades) with specific non-FERPA related information, including assignment reminders
  • Colleagues and staff about upcoming or past events that include links to more information

Five Hacks for Google Sheets

Adopt these hacks to step up your work with Google Sheets. You will be able to get more done and collaborate with others in new ways.

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OneNote hacks
Microsoft

Five OneNote Hacks for Your Classroom

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

If you are using OneNote with your students, you’re probably already aware of how powerful it is. But just like any program, there may be some special features that you don’t know about or haven’t started using. In this blog entry, I’ll share some of the most common ways you can manage OneNote in Class Notebook.

1- Digitize Your Content

As an educator, you probably have pages of projects, activities, resources, and worksheets. When my wife invited me into her second grade classroom for back to school prep, I was astonished at the sheer volume of resources. “Have you thought about digitizing these?” I asked as I clutched an overstuffed manila folder in my hand, waving at even more crammed folders. The question of digitizing content always comes up at OneNote workshops. The best answer is to use a copier/scanner solution. You can drop several binders of content, scan it to PDF, and you are ready to go. FedEx/Kinkos have these awesome scanners at their locations if you don’t have one at school.

Why not carve out $20-$30 to scan your most precious resources? After all, you never know when the ceiling is going to drip a torrent onto your papers. “Wait, then how will I pick out that one page (page 52) of a 200-page PDF when I need it?” The easy answer is to use one of the PDF tools I discuss in my blog entry Top Five PDF Annotation Tools. These tools make it easy to extract one page or several from a large document. It’s so easy, you could show a third grader how to do it for you.

If you want to be more selective of what you digitize, or scan as you go, then take advantage of other Microsoft tools, such as Office Lens  (read Tip #3) or OneDrive (read Tip #4). When should you use one or the other?

Get Google Slides version | Powerpoint version of this infographic template

While either tool can make your work easier, Office Lens can make navigating text easier for your students with the built-in Immersive Reader.

2- Organize Your OneNote Master Notebook

Now that you have your paper digitized, what’s your next step? Organizing all your materials, units, lesson plans, and resources in one place. OneNote can make this difficult process easy. OneNote features sections and sub-sections. I like to organize my OneNote materials following an outline model. For example, consider the following:

  • Notebook Topic – Mathematics
  • Sections Group – This is an overarching idea or concept (e.g. Algebra I). Section Groups work as containers for sections.
    • Section – This is the actual section where you will add pages of content. If Algebra I is the overarching concept, then this might be Introduction to Algebra I.
    • Pages – Places resources, information, and lesson plans relevant to the Section topic in individual pages.
  • Example – In this example, we have tons of resources to keep track of. So our Section Group starts
    • Section Group Title: Algebra I
      1. Section #1 Title: An introduction to Algebra I
        • Pages:
          • Learning Not Performing
          • Making Sense
          • Conjectures, Creativity, and Uncertainty
          • The Beauty of Mistakes
      2. Section #2 Title: Modeling with Functions
        • Pages:
          • Rate of Change
          • Graphs
          • Functions

As you can see, a well-designed outline (I swiped, er, adapted this one from New Visions) can save you work. You can begin to move your content (e.g. digitized documents) into the appropriate section.

3- Curate Content For Placement in Your OneNote Master Notebook

Content curation is the process that you use to select, sift, save, and share content. Many educators use tools like Pinterest, Pocket, Evernote, Diigo, Flipboard, LiveBinder, or Wakelet for this. The drawback with using these tools to store content is simple. If you are in an Office 365 school district, you’ll have to figure out a way to copy that content into your OneNote notebook. Instead of relying on all these other content curation tools, just use OneNote.

In this screenshot, you can see OneNote WebClipper’s main options. With it, you can save to a notebook (e.g. TCEA Connect v4) to a section (e.g. Resource Roundup)

The OneNote Web Clipper will help you clip content (with website source for citation) straight into the notebook and section of your choice. It’s an extension for your Chrome or Firefox web browser. It makes dropping content into OneNote easy-peasy. However, the OneNote Web Clipper is not the only way to get content into your OneNote document. You can also use OneNote’s built-in INSERT menu, as shown below:

For those who are comfortable using social media, you could take advantage of IFTTT.com to automate saving of content into your OneNote notebook. Learn more about how to curate content in this way.

4- Manage OneNote Class Notebook

OneNote Class Notebook includes web-based management tools you can use. You can create, modify, and manage Class Notebooks via this link. After you log in with your Office 365 work/school account, you will see a screen like the one below.

If you click the “Manage notebooks” button, you will be able to select your Class Notebook. Here’s what that looks like:

From the options available, you are able to lock/unlock (off/on) your Class Notebook’s Collaboration Space. Need to share links to the Class Notebook with parents/guardians? You will have the option to select an individual student or generate links for all students. These links provide parents/guardians with access to their student’s individual notebook.

5- Manage OneNote Class Notebook in Microsoft Teams

Just announced in August 2018, teachers using Teams have the ability to access the management component of OneNote from within Teams. Here’s the text of the announcement:

To help save teachers more time when using OneNote Class and Staff Notebooks inside Microsoft Teams, we’re releasing a few key updates. Teachers will enjoy the new and improved Class and Staff Notebook settings directly inside Microsoft Teams – just select “Manage Notebooks” in the tab menu. Plus, we’ve improved the Class Notebook toolbar and added a new Staff Notebook toolbar, specifically for staff teams. In addition, page distribution is now fully supported in the Teams desktop app!
Read more

Using OneNote Class Notebook as a part of Microsoft Teams has other benefits. Be sure to explore Microsoft Teams.

Five OneNote Hacks for Your Classroom

There you go, five OneNote hacks for your classroom. What are some OneNote hacks that you have used or developed to make your work easier?

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