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Google Tips and Tricks

More Ways to Make Your Google Docs Accessible

by Diana Benner
written by Diana Benner

Are you looking for more ways to make your Google Docs accessible? In Make Your Google Docs More Accessible, I listed some ways educators can create more readable documents that will be accessible to students. Check out even more best practices below for creating accessible Google documents.

Add Bullets and Numbered Lists

Just like with headers, bullets and numbered lists can break up large amounts of text. Using bullets and lists helps readers process these items more efficiently. In addition, visual students can quickly and easily scan your document for bulleted lists and numbered items. You should always use the built-in bullets and numbered lists instead of manually inserting them.

To create a list in Google Docs, follow the steps below:

  1. Click on your document where you want to add a list.
  2. In the toolbar, choose a list type, such as numbered or bulleted list.

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Use Tables

One way tables help with accessibly is through the use of header rows and columns. Screen readers automatically read the first row as heading row. Headers provide recurring information that might be needed to understand the information in the table.

To add a table to a Google Doc, follow the steps below:

  1. Click Insert, Table from the menu.
  2. Choose how many rows and columns you want to add. The table will be added to your document.

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Create a Table of Contents

A table of contents can help students navigate your document quickly, in addition to providing a preview of its content, both of which enhance your documents usability. Throughout the document you must use headings because these are used to generate the table of contents section. Using headings is also an accessibility best practice that I highlighted in Make Your Google Docs More Accessible.

To add a table of contents to a Google Doc, follow the steps below:

  1. Click Insert from the menu
  2. Scroll to Table of Contents

It’s Important

Designing learning to meet the needs of all students is so important in education today. Our students need and deserve accessible digital content, so give some of these best practices a try.

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Google Tips and Tricks

Make Your Google Docs More Accessible

by Diana Benner
written by Diana Benner

As educators, there are many things we can do to make our Google Docs more accessible to our students. We should always be thinking about including Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in all that we do. As a matter of fact, the ISTE Standards for Educators call for educators to design authentic, learner-driven activities and environments that recognize and accommodate learner variability (ISTE Standard 5, Designer). Check out the best practices below to create documents that will be more readable and accessible for everyone, including your students.

Use Headings

Make it easier for others to read your document by including headings. Documents organized to include headings will help readers jump to different sections in your document. Structure and properly formatted headings are very important so that your documents can be easily understood and navigated. Besides that, no one wants to read a single long document.

Headings should be selected based on their hierarchy in the document. Usually, you start the document with a heading that describes the overall document, which would be Heading 1. Follow it with a sub-heading, which would be Heading 2, and so on. Any heading style will help those who use a screen reader to navigate through your document.Image of how to create a heading in Google Docs.

To make an item a heading in Google Docs, follow the steps below:

  1. Select the Styles drop-down menu, located to the left of the font drop-down menu or go to Format, Paragraph Styles.
  2. Change from Normal Text to Heading 1, Heading 2, or Heading 3, using the appropriate heading levels for your content structure.

An added benefit of using Headings is that they can be used to automatically generate a Table of Contents or bookmark items in your document.

Add Alt Text to Images

Images can play a significant role in Google Docs. The way to make them accessible is to add Alternative Text, or Alt Text, to the image. Alt text for images is vital to ensuring that users with visual impairments have access to information included in these visuals. Alternative text should provide enough information so that users who are unable to see them are still able to understand what they convey.Image of how to add alt text to an image in Google Docs.

To add alt text to an image embedded in a Google Doc, follow the steps below:

  1. Upload or insert the image.
  2. Click and highlight the image.
  3. Right click on the image and select Alt text.
  4. In the pop-up window, enter a description of the image into the Description field.
  5. Click OK when done.

While there are no hard and fast rules for determining what alternative text should say (it depends on the image, its context, etc.), one simple trick is to imagine describing the image to someone over the phone.

Clearly Describe Hyperlinks

You can make your Google Docs even more accessible by improving how you use hyperlinks in your documents. Hyperlinks should be embedded in text that makes them clear, concise, and meaningful in context. Users visually scan pages for links to help them find the information they are looking for quickly. Those who use screen readers can pull up a list of all the links on your document at the touch of a button; therefore, the links should make as much sense as possible.

For example, a link should say “Closed Captions in Google Slides” instead of “Closed Captions in Google Slides. Click here.”

To best add a hyperlink to a Google Doc, follow the steps below:

  1. Highlight the text you want to make into a hyperlink.
  2. Right click on the text and scroll to Link.
  3. Insert the Link.
  4. Click Apply when done.

Use Color and Contrast Appropriately

Color in your documents is very important. It is critical that the appropriate contrast exist between the text in your document and the background of your document. Lightly colored text should have a darker background and darker colored text should have a light background. In addition, color alone should never be used to emphasize items on your document. Use color plus bold to highlight items. Always remember, what you see may not be what others see.

Accessibility in the Future

As we head into the future, it will be more important than ever to consider accessibility and UDL principles. This means we must rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it. Incorporating these best practices will result in more accessible and usable Google docs.

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UDL
ChromebooksGood Teaching

UDL Chromebook Opportunities for Learning

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Classrooms are diverse. Curriculum needs to be designed from the start to meet this diversity (Source:Universal Design for Learning (UDL) video). Several Texas districts have adopted Chromebooks. How can UDL play a role?

One way includes ebook creation with tools like Book Creator. See the connections that can be made between UDL and Book Creator. Before we do that, let’s revisit Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

UDL

What is UDL?

Universal Design for Learning is about reducing barriers to achievement. Learning preferences, learning strengths, and abilities are some of those barriers. It can help with personal interests and/or levels of engagement and has three guiding principles:

  • Engagement – Engaging learners. This is about motivating others to learn (Source).
  • Representation – Giving learners different ways to acquire information and knowledge.
  • Action and Expression – Demonstrating what they know in many ways.

“These three priorities align with different neural networks. They answer the “what,” “how,” and “why” of teaching and learning,” says Jules Csillag in How to Use Technology to Support UDL. Let’s examine how one of these priorities aligns to a tool like Book Creator.

Did You Know about Book Creator?

Reading and creating ebooks can support UDL. One ebook maker tool is Book Creator. I featured it in this blog entry on Creating gBooks, er, eBooks Just Got Easier. An excellent tool, Book Creator allows for collaborative ePub creation. Students have created over 15 million ebooks. It works on Chromebooks, iOS, Android, and Windows devices. Book Creator allows you to create a simple ePub without media. You can create an enhanced ePub with video, audio, and more embedded. Read their blog for TONS of ideas.

universal

Supporting UDL with Technology

Countless technologies are available to educators. One technology, popular on tablets, became available for Chromebooks. Let’s explore  one of priorities of the UDL guidelines and checkpoints with Book Creator in mind.

  • Engagement
    • Access: It’s important to “optimize individual choice and autonomy” (UDL Checkpoint 7.1). Educators make this happen for students with voice and choice. One choice students could use to produce content is Book Creator. The ability to embed audio, video, images, and text on the page engages students. Students can exert control over “the color, design, or graphics of layouts.”
    • Build: From this perspective, it is important to “create cooperative learning groups with clear goals, roles, and responsibilities” (UDL Checkpoint 8.3). Constructing ebooks provides rich opportunities for cooperative groups. Challenged to combine text, images, audio, and video, students can create various products such as interactive stories, digital portfolios, research journals, poetry books, science reports, and instruction manuals. Book Creator makes comic adventures possible, too (Source).
    • Internalize: Assisting students in facilitating “personal coping skills and strategies” (UDL Checkpoint 7.2). These strategies can be blended into cooperative learning group dynamics. Students can learn how to behave and work together more effectively over time in cooperative learning groups.

More connections are possible for Representation and Action and Expression, too.

Making More UDL Connections

As you consider UDL guidelines, remember that Book Creator can accomplish the following:

  • Student books can be read aloud via text-to-speech capabilities.
  • Book Creator can highlight words as they are read.
  • Students can set the pages of the book to turn on their own.
  • Readers can choose a language or voice, as well as control the speed of reading.
  • Students can auto-play any media.

Ready to learn more about UDL and Book Creator? Get the Chrome browser add-on.

 

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painted hand
Educational TrendsGood Teaching

The Transmediated Learner: The Story of Self (Part 1)

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Note: This is the first in a series of blog entries exploring the concept of the transmediated learner. It is less focused on a handy app list and more about asking the fundamental question “How can we more swiftly assist in the disintermediation of teaching frames so as to better reflect on increasing students’ opportunities to engage in building learning connections between systems?”

learning“Are teachers and curriculum departments being disintermediated as students engage in self-transmediation, crafting the story of themselves across time and space?” When I first wrote that question down, I had no idea that The Transmediated Self was actually a real term. Rather, I was searching for a term that defined learning in a hyper-connected present where people AND things were constantly plugged in and communicating information. Yet it is a term that has profound implications for self-determination in learning. We do not yet appreciate the always-connected aspect of technology and its impact on in transforming our  teacher frames for creating and managing instruction:

Technology is becoming ubiquitous to our daily lives to a point we are constantly connected to “the cloud”. . .To the present day, technology has evolved where certain technologies have become well integrated into everyday experiences whereby it become impossible to tell when one begins/ends or even to do without the technology.
Source: The Transmediated Self – Research and Essay

How does this daily reality affect our students’ learning, and our conventions, as expressed from a teachers’ perspective in approaches like The Differentiated Classroom (Carol Ann Tomlinson’s 1999 book) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL)? Are they still effective for learners? It may very well signal that students have adapted themselves to how various technology systems work, while educators are adapting technology to how they work. This fundamental difference in perspective presents problems for those eager to adopt an Internet of Things (IoT) perspective.

As we set out to design learning opportunities for students, UDL reminds us how important it is to keep learning goals in mind while helping learners:

  1. Show information in different ways;
  2. Help learners show what they know in different ways; and
  3. Offer learners options that engage them and keep their interest. Differentiated instruction, of course, refers to the way a teacher anticipates and responds to a variety of student needs in the classroom.

In both approaches, as many others, it is clear who is in control of learning—the adults. Yet being an adult means having access to information and knowledge networks, as well as the authority to translate information from one system and make it usable in another. In a previous time, that meant navigating physical roads and byways. Now, it involves navigating networks and virtual spaces with aplomb. With that definition in mind, younger learners are “adult” because they engage daily in these types of activities.

Join the ongoing TCEA Microsoft Innovative Educator (MIE) SkypeChat via your mobile device or online. Explore and share concepts at the intersection of teaching, learning, leading, and technology!

When we seek to empower learners to engage in reflective thinking about what they are learning across various technology systems, learners become more “adult.” Instead of students being led through learning activities, students can be co-creators in learning as they negotiate learning and sharing to and from different technology systems (e.g. Instagram, ITSLearning, SnapChat, Schoology, Facebook, Edmodo). This is known as transmediation, which is defined in this way for the independent learners our children have become at an increasingly early age:

Transmediation, the act of translating meanings from one sign system to another, increase students’ opportunities to engage in generative and reflective thinking because learners must invent a connection between the two sign systems, as the connection does not exist a priori. Source: More Than Words – The Generative Power of Transmediation for Learning

This is why the Internet of Things (IoT) serves as a powerful frame for learning. The five paths to becoming an IoT learner enable learners and educators to organize how learning can occur in classrooms, even though it means abandoning current teacher-centric frames of learning. Each IoT path provides learners with rich opportunities for inventing connections between systems. Being always connected suggests an alternate approach to school and curriculum than what we are comfortable with and struggling so hard to assess. Today, the world is available to young learners.  This means students self-determine what they need to know, understand, and are able to do.

Note: Find out more about the Five Paths to Becoming an IoT Learner at the TCEA Maker events.

For learners, this means using technology to connect and share ideas and information across language and cultural barriers. Students are increasingly relying on primary sources. These primary sources of content, which include a wide diet of music, video, text, and images, are instantly available via social media, and there is less need to seek out “processed” information.

Rather, technology-based transmediation tools empower students to “process” information in ways only educators could in the past. As Howard Gardner writes, as cited by Siegil (1995) in ASCD’s Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age, “The best representations are multiple. And so our search should be for the family of representations that can convey core ideas in a multiplicity of ways at once accurate and complementary” (1999, p. 202).” This means that transmediation can be a relevant, life approach for students to achieve deeper learning.

Students must develop or acquire a process for working through raw information, making sense of it, then finding a way to express it. Instead of processed curriculum, the content becomes the world around them, and digital tools disintermediate the curriculum and the teacher. Fortunately, teachers may be invited to exert influence as co-learners with the benefit of experience and reflection.

In future blog entries in this series, The Transmediated Learner, we will explore more ways to flip our thinking as teachers so we may adapt ourselves to the technology systems our children navigate daily.

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