Google Tips and Tricks - Part 1

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the GAFE (Google Apps for Education) New England Summit in Burlington.  Besides being able to visit the Cambridge Google office (see images below) and try on a pair of Google Glasses,  I was also able to learn a lot of in-depth information about the various google products.






Here were some interesting tidbits from my 4-day google-a-thon:

• Google Docs - When adding a comment to a paper, if you start your comment with +, this will send an email to the person with your comment. For example "+studentname@mail.medfield.k12.ma.us you need more clarity" will send that student a message with your comment.  Clicking on the + in your comment will bring up your contacts, so you can easily select a student name without typing it in.

• Google Drive - If you have a Word document in google drive and you want to convert it to a Google doc, you do NOT need to download and then re-upload and convert the doc.  Instead just 'open with Google Docs' (see below)

• Inserting Images -  Now when you go to insert an image and you click on search you have access to insert Stock Images and from Life Magazine.  All these images are labeled for commercial reuse.

• For fun- Go to google.com and type in 'Do a Barrell Roll'

Look out for part 2 coming next week ..

What's your favorite Google Tip?   Please share in the comments section below ..

Adding images to Google Forms

Well they finally did it.  You go Google!

For those of you that use Google Forms regularly you probably were frustrated by not being able to add an image to your forms.  Well our prayers were answered and Google has now added the option to insert images.  When adding an item, you simply need to select on 'image' and then you can uplaod an image from your computer or the web:

For further assistance, watch this video on how to add images to your forms.

How to use in Education:

Being able to insert images makes using forms for quizzes for math or geography or social studies classes much easier.  It will also allow you to create forms that are more esthetically pleasing.