 Welcome to another Wednesday webinar. My name is Katie Morrow, and I'm excited to share with you just a few of my favorite Google things for educators today, knowing that it's quite the challenge to pick a few favorite things from Google, but it's something we all have available as educators and something that can add tremendous power to our day-to-day teaching if we capitalize on these opportunities. So, without further ado, just some few tips and tricks for using Google Better as a teacher. First, I'm going to start with the Google Search. Now, this, of course, was the core tool that Google developed and is synonymous anymore with searching the web. We just say, let's Google it. But if you type certain words and two strings of words into the Google Search query, you can get some even better results. For example, if you type in a string of numbers with operators in between and an equal sign at the end, you not only get the answer instantly Googled, but also a calculator so that you can do further calculations. Notice in this particular example that order of operations is followed as well. Also in your search bar, you can type in any kinds of conversions, whether it be measurements, time zone conversions, the time right now in a certain place, dollars and money, and any kind of measurement. Just type in what you want converted and Google will provide it for you. If you use the letters VS in between two terms or words or phrases, you can compare and contrast things. Rather than clicking on two different hits or links that Google suggests and then comparing the items yourself, you can see a side-by-side table comparison which really lays out a lot of key data for you. So the next time you're encouraging your students to learn about more than one thing, have them try the verses in between the two words. What teacher doesn't need an on-screen timer for a certain tasks, if you just put into your Google search bar, set timer for and then the amount of time you want it for, it will instantly start counting down from that set time. When it's finished, it will give an audible sound and you can stop it and reset it at any point as well. You can also roll a die, get a randomly generated side of a die that's rolled whenever you type that into Google, or flip a coin, do a little lesson on probability or just randomly generating heads or tails in order to decide what the next classroom activity might be. Google image search is something that most of us are pretty familiar with, but I want to show you a few tools to get even more power out of using this tool. I'm going to actually escape out of the presentation for a second now and go off into a blank Google screen and type in the word Cowboys as my example and then of course we know to click on images to get the image search results. Now if I just do this, you'll notice that the first majority of the images that come up are the NFL franchise. That wasn't necessarily what I was looking for in my research. I was looking for western type cowboys. So it's important to know that if you just go to the right here and click this search tools button, you'll automatically get a whole bunch more features and commands to get better results from this image search, starting with size. Possibly I want an image that's big enough to blow up and print off or put onto a large screen projector without it looking pixelated and blurry. So I could just choose a large image or maybe the inverse. Maybe I just want a small icon that would load quickly on a web page. For color, I could actually look for images of a certain color type or color family and notice how that quickly changes the image results. I could also do a black and white image which might be nice for black and white printing purposes. Under type, we can get any type of image including photographs instead of the icons we were getting before and notice how this changes it. Let me switch it back to any color and when I switch it then to photographs now I get a few more of those western cowboys that I was looking for and less of the Dallas cowboys. I can also switch to just clip art. So maybe I just want an icon cartoon type drawing that I could use on a handout. The time as the time it was published or shared with Google, probably the most important part of this section is usage rights. So if you are hoping to use this without fear of breaking any rules or getting in trouble by the artist, you definitely want to switch the usage rights down to labeled for reuse and depending on if you want to modify it or not or if you just want to use it non-commercially like in the classroom. You can choose which settings you want. It's just important that you choose something and I think that this is one that you can encourage your students to do. Model it, show it to them and then expect that they do that when they're using Google images on their projects. Not just take the first images that come in the Google search but rather making sure that they're cleared for using in other venues. There's also more tools down to the right here and we can clear this all off and set it back. But remembering again that if we just take that extra second to click on the search tools button and then do some additional narrowing down of our search results, it will come out more beneficial for us, for all that are involved in the end. I also want to remind us that when we are using an image, we don't want to just save the image from this first set of results. These are thumbnail images so they're low quality and they will blur and be hard to see when you put them into larger slides or larger setting. So rather always click on the image once and then maybe even click it again to view it on its own or visit the page that it came from and from there save the image, not from this low quality, low resolution thumbnail image. So that's a little bit about Google image search and I hope you can see why it was important to go out and do that in action. Another search tool that's available in Google is searching by voice. So being able to click on your Chrome browser on any Google search bar on the little speaker to the right of it. And when you click that, then you can just audibly say your search term rather than type it in. If you want to enable a feature called OK Google, your Chrome browser might walk you through that and let you then give the command OK Google to search for something, again with your voice rather than typing. Another feature that's been in Google forever is the ability to translate. And while we can do it with translate colon and then the word, we can also visit translate.google.com. This is not a perfect translation or even a best translation at times, it's pretty literal. So you are able to choose the language, origin and the destination, language both. And you're able to type or talk. And one thing that people don't often take advantage of is this ability for Google to translate a document. So you could do a whole web page or upload a note to go home. So again, remembering this is just a rough translation and definitely is not perfect. It's at least a start. It's at least a baseline understanding of somebody who speaks a different language, helping you as the listener understand or a better yet you as the speaker convey your message to someone else. The next tip I have for you in getting more out of Google is using Universal Find. This can be on any web page that's text based or any part of your Chrome browser experience or even on a Google Doc itself. If you just click Command F on a Mac, on a Windows it's Control F, that brings up the find bar. On my screenshot here, it's in the upper right hand corner. And Command F will then allow you to search for certain words or terms throughout whatever is showing on your screen. In this USA Today news article, for example, I searched for McDonald's and found all the occurrences of that word. I instantly highlighted them all and said there's one of seven that's being displayed here. And this can be helpful on a variety of fronts. For one reason, we can easily locate things we're looking for, whether it's somebody's name or a specific part of an article that we're hoping to read. We can just jump to it quickly. But also we can use it for editing and revising purposes. If a word or a term is overused, either in our own writing or our students' writing, we can use Universal Find to point that out to us. Working with the Chrome browser gives us even more flexibility in controlling our tabs and bookmarks. And if I escape out again, you'll know that you can have many tabs open across the top. But being able to pin one of those down, right clicking or control clicking on one and then choosing Pin tab, puts it so that it's consolidated and takes up less space. And also every time you open your browser, it will keep that tab pinned there. So you might do that with your calendar or some tab that you frequently want open and available. Just pin it down and have it always be handy. You can also edit your bookmarks bar. If you set any of these URLs to be a bookmark in your bookmarks bar, then you can definitely move them around. And you can edit them by changing the name to be something else and maybe shortening it or explaining it a little bit better so that you can get more out of your bookmarks bar. And if you're like me, you sometimes accidentally close a tab that you didn't mean to. If you remember the keyboard shortcut Command Shift T, or on a Windows machine, Control Shift T, it will open the tab that you most recently closed. So you accidentally closed it. Oh, whoops, I didn't mean to do that. Just hit Command Shift T and it will pop back open. Another Google tool that I think is helpful for us as educators and just as professionals in general is Google Alerts. And if you visit alerts.google.com and you've never set it up before, it will start by recommending that it sets up an alert for your name and your email address. This makes sense because what it's trying to do is take the time out of you coming back to Google every day or every week and continuously searching for the same topics. Instead, it's always on the lookout for those topics that you've added into your alerts. And when it comes across one that's being shared on the web, it'll automatically send you a notification, an email message. You can set up how often you want those email notifications if you want them instantly when Google finds something that matches your terms or you can have them set up to be weekly or however you want it. But this is really beneficial not only to be aware of what's being published online about yourself, maybe in blog posts or in news articles, but also just to keep current on topics of interest. So it might be something about teaching third grade or math or whatever you're interested in. You can set up an alert for that and then Google will constantly be on the lookout for new information that's being published on the web. Google Alerts are something that I highly encourage my students to set up as well. Being that active digital citizen and being aware of your digital footprint, whether other people are publishing it about you or yourself. Just having an alert set up so that you can keep track of all the information online. Now we're going to switch into Google Docs for a little bit. And Google Docs to me are the real power of where having a Google account lies. The ability to create a doc of any type, whether it be a word processing document, a spreadsheet, a slideshow, a form and even more. I'm going to start just with a blank document here. You'll notice on my slides that I mentioned a fairly new feature. Then you can start with something that's a little bit more preset and already developed rather than the white blank sheet. This is similar to Word or Pages where you can start with a book report template or a resume or a science project or a certificate. And it gives you a little bit from which to work with if you want to use those templates. But for the purposes of this next demonstration, I'm just going to use a blank Google Doc. Nothing on it and show you a new feature that Google Docs has just added that only works in the Chrome browser. So it won't work in Safari or Firefox, but it will be available under the Tools menu if you're in Chrome. You just go down to Voice Typing, so Tools, then Voice Typing. And it gives you this little microphone on the side which you can then click to turn on. And now it's recording everything that I say. And without typing anything on my keyboard, I'm going to pretend that that worked because I'm fearful that it might mess up my recording here. If I wasn't recording into the webinar, it would automatically pick up my voice and then convert it to typed text without me needing to type it myself. Now it's very similar to using a voice dictation on your cell phones and that it's not an exact English representation of your language. In other words, you have to say the end punctuation. You have to say period, comma, question mark, things like that. But it's a good first draft of your thoughts and ideas. And I think whether it be for myself to maybe be a little bit lazy or my students, the Voice Typing is a really powerful tool. Being able just to get your thoughts and ideas down on paper as a first draft. And then showing them the value in going back and revising and editing and making sure that Google got it the way you wanted it. This is powerful in just our general communication skills. Another powerful tool in Google Docs has been around forever, but our students and ourselves, we tend to forget about it from time to time. So this is revision history. And for this one, I'll show you a document that's actually student authored collaboratively. So one student started it, shared it with the other student and the teacher, of course, as best practice tells us to do. And then at a certain point as the teacher, I want to go back in and see who's contributed what or what is the history of this document. So I can go to file, see revision history whenever I feel like visiting this. And it opens it up on the sidebar so I can go back to the very first moment that this document originated and you can see it's blank. And nothing happened until a couple of hours later when Gloria got on and typed a message, Eric, what they want to do on this document. It sat there still until the next day when then Gloria took out her directions and they got started and got to work. You can see what Eric added, what he added later on, and how it continuously changed and evolved. And then the suggestions that you would give as a teacher. And at any point you can restore to that version if, for example, you think a previous version was better. Or sometimes I know my students would accidentally lose some of their work to showing them that revision history is here and that they can revert back to any prior version that can be powerful. Also just showing ownership and accountability for what you contribute to Google Docs. So revision history. I also want to talk about commenting and markup. Now this is very true in my past experiences as an English teacher, but even as professionals working with other people or in the case of my example now as a mom, my daughter would ask me to proofread something and before she hands it in and I'm more than happy to do that. But if she just shares her Google Doc with me and I start typing, I unfortunately am not going to have the teachable moments. I'm just going to be doing it for her and just editing and changing it without her knowing why I'm doing that. So underneath of edit modes, we have the ability to change between three modes. Editing, suggesting, and viewing mode. So if we just switch it to suggesting mode, it doesn't look very much different at all other than we now have this green eyeball icon. And when we do type on the document, like I just take out a word, it does a strike through with a comment box rather than just making the change for the first author. You can take out words, you can change them, you can do anything whether it's adding more spaces or punctuation and everything will be noted on the side with the requirement that the author comes back through and either accepts or rejects each change. This forces them to think about the editing suggestions and act on them based on their own personal preferences rather than just doing it for them. This is great for peer review, this is great for just sharing ideas. And even if you're not in this suggesting mode, even if you're just in a normal Google Doc, you can also highlight a sentence. I'll get out of revision history here and just go back. At any time, even without being in that suggesting mode, you can just go to insert, comment, and it will highlight on the screen and put the comment box off to the side saying Katie Morrow said this. This is a great way to ask your co-authors a question or give a suggestion without changing it on the Google Doc itself. What I really like about comments is that they are automatically emailed to the other collaborators. So if I just change something on a Google Doc alone, I have to expect and hope that my co-author, my collaborator, goes back on and checks the Google Doc to know the changes that have occurred. But if I insert it as a comment, they'll get an email notification saying there's been a comment here and then they have to either again resolve that comment or close it out. So you know that they are seeing what you're writing on that Google Doc. Definitely we could spend a long time in Google Docs. There's so much power in there in spreadsheets, in forms, in add-ons to the forms and self-grading quizzes and generating polls and slideshows and presentations, all kinds of powerful stuff. But on the sake of time, we're going to switch gears a little bit now and just talk about add-ons. Things that you can add to your Chrome browser as far as extensions and apps. And there are so many of them available in the Chrome Web Store. You can pretty much find an extension or an app for about anything. So if there's something you're wanting to do on your computer, search the Chrome Web Store and see if there's a tool, an extension, an app to do so. I want to share a couple of my favorite extensions. One is called Speak It. They're both free. Speak It does text to speech within Chrome. So if you install this extension in your browser, you'll get a little icon that looks like this. And on any text-based page, again maybe it's a news article or a Google Doc, you can just click that speaker and then Chrome will say it out loud to you. So you will be able to have that read to you or read into your earbuds or even as an English teacher again. I would ask my students to have their own writing read back to them just so that they could hear and make sure that what they typed matches what they thought they typed. A second favorite Chrome extension is ScreenCastify. This is the ability to record anything on your screen along with your voice. So as a teacher, I could record a lesson and then deliver it in flipped classroom style or prepare for being gone or for students who are gone by recording a lesson or a lecture. It records everything that I do on Chrome on my screen as well as my voice along with it. And it's this little icon up in the upper right-hand corner of my Chrome browser. It's a ScreenCastify screen recorder. You have to set up some settings and say where you want the screencasts, the recordings to be saved probably in your Google Drive folder and enable your microphone and your recording tools and then you're ready to go and create those on the fly pretty easily. So again, check out all the various extensions and tools and don't be afraid to look for more that you didn't even know existed. Another Google tool that I really enjoy and get a lot of you out of is the Google URL shortener. You just visit GOO.GL Google and then paste in your long URL, whether it be a Google Doc or a Google Form. They have really long web addresses that are too hard to type in for many of our students or too time consuming. So if we just paste them into the Google shortener, we get a much shortened version of that URL. Now you'll notice that there is one disadvantage. You can't customize it. You can't put the characters that you want to be after the GOO.GL and then the slash. But they are fairly short and easy to type in. But there's two more strong positives and benefits to using this tool. One is that it keeps them in a running list for you, a record of all of the URLs that you shortened. So you can go back to URLs that you shortened in the past and easily retrieve that shortened URL. You can also have a click or a hit counter to give you a few stats on it. And if you click details off here to the right in my screenshot, it will open up this screen that you see, which is a little bit more detailed information and statistics about that. And an automatically generated QR code for every URL that you shortened. So then you can just drag that QR code off and use it in anything else on a poster, on a website, on a presentation. And it's just always generated when you use the Google URL shortener. So you don't have to go to a QR code generator site in addition. We could talk all day about the wonderful tools that are associated with Google. I've only had a chance to just scratch the surface, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power, tremendous potential that these tools have to offer us as educators. I want to finish with a few of my favorites that are related Google tools and just a reminder that a lot of this Google goodness works within them as well. First of all, YouTube, whether it's for me as a learner myself, searching for videos to learn something new or creating a playlist on a certain topic or an entire channel to share my videos or my school's videos out with the world, you can't beat YouTube. And it is of course a free Google tool that's tied to your Google account as well. Blogger as an English teacher or just as a professional being able to share my message, follow blogs, publish on blogs, collaborate with other bloggers. This works slick and easy, especially when your students already have Google accounts. They already have a blog that's waiting for them to customize and start writing on. And Google Photos is a fairly new tool or it's been repurposed by Google, I guess, in the past year or so. But what's nice about it is if you run out of storage for your photos and you don't have space on your device, your phone or your computer to keep all of your photos, Google Photos has unlimited storage of pretty high quality images. So you can always have them saved in Google Photos as a backup and then retrieve them and share them and do some of all the other things that you can do with Google tools with the images that you also mark in that space. And then finally Google Sites. And while this isn't the prettiest web designing platform or even the easiest to use, it is available, it is free, it is part of our Google account and it's collaborative. So I can start a Google site and have somebody else on my team help me update it. So that part makes it nice. It's pretty easy to get communication out with a Google site and just again remembering that they're available as part of our Google suite of tools that are available to us. So no matter what, keep in mind whether it be with Google or anything else that technology is constantly changing and it is imperative that we don't stop learning and rather stay connected to all the updates and great things that are happening in the sphere of Google or anything else. I have a couple of resources here. First is a handout from a different Google for Educators session with some links and some other Google tools to visit. So you can type in that URL and check that out. There's also someone online called the Google Guru and you can subscribe to his really well done short tips to be delivered into your email inbox if you visit theguru.com. Or you could join a Google Plus community by visiting plus.google.com, setting up your Google Plus presence and then following certain communities that are related to your interests. Just no matter what, keep learning, keep in touch, keep exploring the potential of these Google tools because no matter what, we don't want to be left like this in this scene.