Tech Tuesday 07/09/21

Want to maximise your productivity (more time for coffee) some time-saving tips for Google drive - shortcuts & workspaces 

Tech Tuesday 14/09/21

Intro to using Google Classroom originality reports to combat plagiarism in pupil submissions.

Tech Tuesday 21/09/21

Numerous ELC settings use Ipads. Want to extend your skills and do more than taking photos and updating e-journals?

Each week the Digital Learning Team will share some simple but effective tips and tricks to get the best from your device. This week we are starting with using the space bar effectively to make corrections to text.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eCYO80blgxMjQqZxdNliuaF-bIvZ2n1n/view?usp=sharing

Is keeping on top of multiple calendars proving to be hard work? View all of your events from your GLOW and Google calendars in one place. This video will guide you through: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eVBz0zXa6QgKpvJPF6_9ga7mKrGphEoy/view

Tech Tuesday 28/09/21

Thinking of switching your school website to Google Sites? Former Stirling High pupil David Beechey’s Medium article gives some great guidance!

Want to take control of changes in a shared doc? Have a look at this overview of the version history and document views functions in google docs (also works in slides, sheets, jamboard etc).

Tech Tuesday 05/10/21

Personify Something (iPad users)

Longing for that cartoon moustache you just can’t grow? Personalise your photographs on IPad - give this overview a look.

Chromebook Accessibility Tools

Help your pupils to access the curriculum more independently by using the accessibility tools built into their Chromebooks - a quick how to.

Tech Tuesday 26/10/21

If you’re considering setting up parent’s consultations then read on: 

Google Calendar has a free built-in scheduling tool for parental consultations called Appointment Slots.

We’ve put together a guide for Teachers and for Parents: 

Teacher’s guide: Creating parents consultation slots with Google Calendar - teachers/educators

Parent and teacher details are also available on SPEC here: https://spec.stirlingschools.net/digital-learning-hub/primary-reporting#h.xlw2kybsjd3g

Tech Tuesday 09/11/21

Want to set a time limit on your collaborators’ ability to suggest revisions on a shared doc? See how in this week’s tech tip! 

Tech Tuesday 16/11/21

Apple Tips

Looking for top tips to support you to get the most from your iPad? Well, it couldn't be easier

First of all, download the Tips app from the App store.

Next, go to settings > Notifications > Tips

From here you can toggle to allow notifications and choose options for the style and location of Tip notifications.

Now you are all set to view collections of top tips for your ipad

Tech Tuesday 23/11/21

This week we’ll show you how to use Google forms to collect actual files (images, videos, docs etc), not just checked boxes and written responses! Loads of potential uses in admin, gathering pupil evidence, competition submissions, photographed consent forms - so many possibilities. 

Tech Tuesday 02/11/21

Use Google Forms? Want to know how you can direct respondents to a particular section/set of questions based on a prior response? See this week’s tech tip for how to use “GoTo Section” in forms.

Tech Tuesday 30/11/21

Fed up with time-consuming, impersonal feedback? Want to leave accessible recorded verbal comments on your pupils’ work at the click of a mouse. Give the Mote extension a try.

Tech Tuesday 07/12/21

Engage your learners using ActivInspire and Classflow

Do you use ActivInspire? It’s a pretty useful tool in the classroom and can be made even better by allowing your pupils to see your flipchart slides from their Chromebooks - this is great for differentiated tasks, pupils who need a bit longer with the information and learning intention or for those pupils that can’t see the main classroom screen easily.

This video guide will walk you through the simple process of getting your flipchart slides to your pupils using the in-built Classflow feature. It walks through the teacher-side setup and guides you through the pupil experience - pupils use a link and code provided by the teacher with no unnecessary pupil account creation.  Enjoy!

Tech Tuesday 11/01/22

Want to make finding and analysing information in your spreadsheets a little less soul destroying? This week’s tech tip covers the basics of using filters to find the data you actually want in different ways and also introduces filter views (which you probably didn’t know about).

Tech Tuesday 18/01/22

This week we have a great tip from Andy Edwards:

Pupils can capture their creativity on a Chromebook using the Screen shot tool, either a photo or a walkthrough video of their work. There’s a simple keyboard shortcut that allows access to the tool. More details here.

Tech Tuesday 25/01/22

This one is more of a curiosity than a skill, but could be a fascinating tool for use in some lessons. Google’s free Ngram viewer will create a graph displaying the frequency of any word or phrase’ use over a period of history (you can define between 1500 and the present day). See this quick guide.

Tech Tuesday 01/02/22

Google My Maps is a brilliant tool to bring mapping and learning together. In this video Andy looks at what you can do with My Maps and explains some of the key features to get you and your pupils into digital mapping - uses range from Maths to History and everything in between. Here’s the link to the video and visit google.com/maps to get started. Happy mapping!

Tech Tuesday 01/03/22

The wonderful Ms.Edwards from Balfron High, has been kind enough to share this excellent overview of Blooket (think Kahoot… but more fun) for this week’s tech tips. Give it a watch!

Tech Tuesday 08/02/22

Want to share your slideshows in the simplest, cleanest format with no distractions around the edges. Embed it in a website? Stop other viewers from being able to see your speaker notes or copy the file? Then you need to know how to share slides to web. 

Tech Tuesday 22/02/22

Go incognito? If you haven’t heard of the incognito window, you probably should have. Incognito allows you to quickly open a web browser window which is not signed in to your Google account. Really useful for checking links, files, videos etc. that you share will be viewable by people outside the council (if that’s what you want) and for signing into a different Google account simultaneously, without signing out from your main one. See our video guide to find out more.

Tech Tuesday 08/03/22

Signing your life away with a pen & paper is just so passé (sorry HR. we love you really…). Want to use a digital signature - no printing and posting required? Let us show you how to create one for signing PDF documents and initialling revisions using Dochub in mere minutes. Video here.

Also, a repeated appeal - if you have a tech tip or some good practice to share (or suggestions for our next one) we’d love to hear from you so get in touch.

Tech Tuesday 15/03/22

Are you tired of forever having to sort the formatting of text out in a document, slide or an email? I was until I discovered these handy tools to become a pro text formatter. 

This video tech tip will show you how to remove formatting from lots of text, paste text without bringing the formatting with it and how to apply a format style easily to other text in your document. I’m sure you’re feeling less tired already…

Tech Tuesday 22/03/22

Everyone loves a shortcut right? In this week’s very short tech tip video, we have a look at three keyboard shortcuts everyone should know: inserting hyperlinks, switching between windows and reopening recently closed tabs.

Tech Tuesday 29/03/22

For the more organisationally minded among you, this week’s tech tip briefly highlights Lucidchart. Even the free version has a huge range of templates which make visualising information and processes easier - everything from organisational flowcharts to website maps are available. It’s even cloud based so sharing and collaborating is easy.

Tech Tuesday 26/04/22

Want to take more control of notifications/email alerts for your Google Classrooms? Have a look at this week’s tech tip to find out where and how to manage these settings.

Tech Tuesday 03/05/22

There have been a few new tools and tweaks appearing in Google docs etc. recently, so I wanted to share one I was particularly tickled to see appearing - dropdown buttons in Google docs.

Tech Tuesday 10/05/22

This week's Tech Tips walk through a couple of Google tools that translate text from one language into another. Google Docs can output a whole document into another language and Google Translate can live-translate spoken word into another language - these tools can help those pupils starting their journey into the English language.

Tech Tuesday 17/05/22

Want an easy way to make sure documents (reports, records, parental correspondence etc.) have been checked and approved by colleagues before distribution/sharing more widely? Need a record that someone has accepted the content of a doc without hunting for a messy email trail a month down the line? Then Approvals, a new(ish) feature of various Google docs is for you. Check out this week’s tech tip here .

Tech Tuesday 24/05/22

People chips!? (no silly, not chips made out of people) are a really handy, if weirdly named, feature in Google sheets. They allow you to auto-convert email addresses in a sheet to their associated names, in addition to providing contact methods and meeting scheduling. Maybe quite niche, but probably means you don’t need to keep starting your Google forms with a question asking the respondent’s name anymore, so that’s something. Have a look here.

Tech Tuesday 31/05/22

Has your laptop Power button ruined your day recently?

This Tech Tip will guide you through disabling the Power button on the Dell school laptops so that it can't be accidentally tapped leading to a shutdown and subsequent ruination of your day.

Tech Tuesday 23/08/22

No, it really doesn’t matter what you do. After seven weeks, forgotten passwords are a near inevitability. So this week’s tech tip is a reminder of how teachers can reset pupil Google (for chromebooks etc.) and Glow passwords.

Tech Tuesday 30/08/22

Many thanks to Kim Allan @ Stirling High for sharing the following tips to support our Ukrainian pupils. 

“We have had a few new admits from Ukraine over at Stirling High. A useful resource we have shared is the ability to translate web pages through Chrome (right click the page, scroll to translate to English, click the 3 dots on the pop up bar, select language of your choosing and then click translate). 

I've also used https://www.onlinedoctranslator.com/en/ to translate pdfs into Ukrainian too.”

We also wanted to let you know the Google Translate Chrome extension has now been whitelisted for all users to install. This is ideal for translating content on webpages by simply highlighting. Tutorial here.

More great advice for supporting these learners can be found on the SPEC site EAL page here.

Tech Tuesday 06/09/22

Tech Tips 

Work in a school with iffy WiFi? Sick of manually converting MS docs to Google docs? Do your lazy hands want your fingers to do all the work? This week’s tech tips are a quick run through using Google Drive/Docs offline, auto converting files to Google Docs format and where all the Google drive shortcuts are.

Tech Tuesday 13/09/22

Tech Tips 

Have you come unsynced? This week’s tech tip is a little obscure, but potentially very useful if some of your Google Drive files/folders seem to have gone AWOL (don’t panic! They haven’t really). While this is an uncommon issue, it’s worth understanding why it can happen and how to resolve it.

Tech Tuesday 20/09/22

This probably doesn’t sound like a very exciting tech tip (compared to last week’s positively thrilling look at how to re-sync your google account...) but it is, honestly, it’s really useful. If you use Google Calendar, or are starting to, you’ll know that you can add individual people to an event when you create it. But… did you know you can create and share a link (URL or HTML) which recipients can click to add themselves to an event you created, copying said event into their calendar too? Great for organising extracurricular club sign-ups, open days and much more (probably). See how to here.

Tech Tuesday 04/10/22

This week’s tech tip is for all you annotators out there (yes English teachers, we’re looking at you and your poems). One of the only things that Google Slides lacks is the ability to annotate/write over your slides while presenting and keep/edit the annotations. While it would be astounding if this didn’t eventually become a built in feature, for now, the Annotate: Web Annotations extension is a lifesaver. While most teachers would use it for annotating slideshows, annotations can be created over any web based docs or sites.

Tech Tuesday 01/11/22

This week’s tech tip take looks at an often overlooked Google tool which is great for any educators who regularly need to take, receive, organise, edit or share photos and video

Google Photos offers unlimited storage via your school account and makes sharing and organising super-easy.

Tech Tuesday 08/11/22

Stop motion videos are universally fun, just ask Morph (reference applicable to 30+ teachers only). Want to make super easy and quick stop motion videos? Have a basic webcam or camera on your device? Check out this week’s tech tip on using the OKIOCAM stop motion video recording extension. Astonishingly quick, easy and fun for all the faculty.

Tech Tuesday 15/11/22

Alas, NOverlay is no-longer (still a mystery why…). Many of our learners and educators used this Chrome extension to reduce visual stress and improve accessibility of web content by automatically changing the background colour to one selected by the user. This week’s tech tip explores two alternative, comparable (but slightly different) extensions which you can suggest to pupils: Colour Overlay & Green Eye. Both have now been whitelisted on the admin console, so pupils can install them on their Chromebooks.

Tech Tuesday 22/11/22

Apparently a picture is worth a thousand words… and yet sometimes you still need a caption… and in Google docs there isn’t an obvious way to add one. Or make it stick to your image if you make the brave decision to move it (just use text wrap people!). A colleague recently brought up this issue (thanks Heather!) so we thought it would be good to share some possible solutions in this week’s tech tip. 

Tech Tuesday 29/11/22

While we all know that ensuring your desk’s surface is ~80% post-it notes will let everyone around you know you are a productivity machine, there might just be a better way of doing things… This week’s tech tip takes a quick look at the very easy to use Google “Tasks” app - a digital to-do/checklist at your fingertips.

Tech Tuesday 06/12/22

You prepared an awe-inspiring assembly, found the perfect Youtube video to embed a link to, clicked the video link… P1-3 are now watching a 30 second advert for Majestic Wine’s bulk delivery service (tracking cookies). How about we show you how to change youtube URLs to remove ads and make it just start playing full fullscreen, no fuss? Check out this week’s tech tip.