Adding Shared Files to Google Drive and Using the "add star" feature

With the increasing use of Google Drive and sharing files, finding those shared files can be a challenge. Good news! There’s an easy way to manage all of those files and organize them to your liking. Click on the link below for a video explanation about how to do this. 

Adding shared files to Google Drive: Video

Fixing the “The webpage is not available" error when accessing YouTube: video

iBoss Override Shortcut and Google Drive "add star"

Click the link below for a video showing how to get that pesky iBoss override to appear so you don’t get stuck with this:

Please see this video to learn how to create an iBoss shortcut: video

MLA Setup in Google Docs

MLA Setup in Google Docs

Link to printable version

Margins:

Click File → Page Setup

1. Set Top, Left, and right margins to 1 inch
2. Set the bottom margin to 0.7 inch

Line Spacing:

1. Click Format → Line Spacing → Custom Spacing (see image below)
2. Set the line spacing to 1.91

←

Header

1. Click in the Header area of your document
2. Change the font to Times New Roman, 12
3. For a ½” header margin, push Enter twice before typing

Page number

1. Click Insert → Page number
2. If you don’t have a ½” header margin above your page number, be sure to click Enter twice before the page number to bring it down

Hanging Indent for Works Cited

1. After you have typed your Works Cited, highlight all of the text of your Works Cited
2. Grab the little bar on the ruler at the top and drag it to the right. When you hover your mouse over it, you will see “First Line Indent”.
3. Be sure that you don’t also drag the inverted triangle as that will indent all lines

Google Photos

Google Photos gives you unlimited storage for pictures and videos. This unlimited storage for photos and videos is available on your personal Google accounts, not just your District account. You just install the app on your phone or tablet, open it up, and you will be prompted to enable back up and sync of your photos. Then, whenever you are on WiFi, the app will back-up your photos online. You can access them from within the app or online at photos.google.com.  What’s really great is that, occasionally, you will receive a notification that Google Photos has created a photo story or an animation from your pics. Some of them are really fun. So, feel free to take hundreds of Halloween photos without worrying about filling up your phone. Just open the Google Photos app to be sure that they have been backed up, and you are safe to delete them from your phone. 

Share to Google Classroom

If you are using Google Chrome on a District computer, some of you might have noticed the little green Google Classroom icon in the upper right corner of your browsers and in the browsers of our student computers.

Clicking this icon allows you to push a website out to all of the students enrolled in your Google Classroom. Once students are logged into Google Chrome (this happens when they log into the browser when they first open it up), all that you need to do is navigate to the site that you want to share with the class, click the button, chose the class, and click Push. A new browser window will then pop open on all of the student computers and automatically navigate to that site.

It works like a charm (sometimes). In my experience, using this feature with Chromebooks is great. Using it with laptops seems spotty. 

Fair Use

Is it OK to put that picture on your class website? Are you legally allowed to use a specific photo in your PowerPoint presentation? Check out the link below to a good explanation of fair use in education.

Fair use summary: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

Fair use in presentations: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/academic-and-educational-permissions/proposed-fair-use-guidelines/

Add Extensions to Google Chrome

Extensions add functionality to Google Chrome and to Google Drive apps such as Docs and Forms. To add extensions to Chrome, simply click on the three lines in the upper right corner of Chrome, click More tools - Extensions. You will then see a list of your installed extensions. Scroll to the bottom and click Get more extensions to see what is available to add. See the video below for more information.



Here are some of my favorite extensions. Just click the +Add to Chrome button to install.

Readability: Clicking on the Readability button will clean up web pages to create a clean view. This is great for articles you find online.

Distraction Free: This cleans up YouTube, eliminating ads, suggested videos, and other clutter.

AdBlock: Blocks ads from webpages and YouTube

1-Click Timer: Add a pop-up timer to Chrome