 Hi everyone. This is Masada Disenhouse from 350.org. I'm the North America Organizing Coordinator and I'm really happy to be joining you tonight to talk a little bit about using Google tools in your organizing. And I'm getting feedback, so I'm going to go and turn that off. Okay, as you can see, this is our first time trying this out today and just wanted to make sure that everything is working. And okay, well welcome everyone. We're gonna get started. And again, this is the first time we're trying using Google on Air for a webinar rather than our usual maestro because we want to be able to share our screen with you. And we would love your feedback on what works well and what doesn't work well so that we know for next time. One of the things we know we won't be able to do is take your questions by voice. So if you do have questions, we're asking people to go to the on the YouTube page. You should be able to use the chat there. And Michelle is going to flag questions and send them over my way. And we have a few times where we will take questions and hopefully try to answer them. Do you want to say, even though we did call this everything Google, we are not going to cover everything about Google tonight. There's a lot to cover even in the parts that we chose to do tonight. And we're really happy to answer questions that you have later on. So I hope that folks were able to read the Getting Started area here before. You're welcome to either follow along with what we're doing on your computer tonight or just watch this later and do it on your own time. We really encourage you to do this training with another person in your group so that you can do some of the exercises together, especially the sharing ones that require working with somebody else. We did want to point out that we don't recommend having more than one Google account. You can have multiple email addresses that point to the same Google account. We also have noticed that Google, some of the Google apps don't work very well with some Apple tablets. So that's an issue you may run into. And while you can use many of the Google apps on your smartphone, some of them work better than others, we're going to be using the computer version. We recommend you do the same unless you really mainly use these apps on your phone. And we will take a look at Doodle also tonight. So what this training will and will not cover. Basically, we're trying to look to take a look at the basics of what Google Drive and Google Calendar and Google Groups can do for you. So we're going to talk about sharing files and permissions. We will not be talking tonight about Gmail, though we do have some comments on Gmail at the end of this document. And we will not be looking at specific features of how to use Google Docs and Google Sheets, though we do recommend, of course, that you learn those. We know that people are in different places. Some people are new to these apps and some have a decent amount of experience. So this is definitely more on the basic side. Feel free to tune out as you need to. Or if I'm going too fast for you, please feel free to try this out later on your own and to send any questions that you may have. Unfortunately, we can't troubleshoot any problems that you're having on the phone, but we will, we have allocated time to answer specific questions about how to use the applications. Also wanted to note that Google Apps don't always look the same on everybody's browser and different platforms. And so you may need to experiment a little to find the same functions. And finally, I am not an expert on everything Google, though I do use them quite a bit. So please do be patient with me if I need to try and track something down at some point tonight. So the first thing I wanted to look at is just how do you get to the different apps that Google has available for you? And the easiest way to get to them is to use your App Launcher, which is up here. It's the nine little squares and you basically click on it and you can choose which application you want to go to. I have an application, a free application that you can download called Custom Application Launcher that allows me to easily, and I highly recommend it. It's free. You can download it. It makes it really easy to put new applications into your App Launcher. So I could add this one here or I could take it out if it's not something I want to use. And these are the ones that are going to show up in my, in my little app drawer there. So that's the App Launcher. I'll close that out now. And next we're going to talk about Google Groups a little bit. So first of all, and I'm not going to go through all this in detail, but some of these things are things you might want to consider in thinking about how you use Google Groups and when you use Google Groups. Basically, I think most people know we tend to use Google Groups because it's a free easy way for people to email each other to have online discussion, to share news or upcoming events or volunteer opportunities. It basically sends your email to a whole bunch of people without you as the sender needing to know what their individual email addresses are or even their names. It also creates a record of the group emails that can be viewed at any time by any member of the group. So you have a nice documentation there. And it also allows people to change their own settings and to unsubscribe if they want to on their own. So it's an easy form for that. We did want to note that not everybody reads email in the same way. I'll show you that in a moment. And that it's always the easiest, the easiest way to send an email to the whole group is always to just send it to the email address that the group belongs to. And that will usually be like 350 Chicago or whatever at googlegroups.com. We think it's important to think about when you use Google Groups versus some of the other applications that you may have at your discretion. For example, compared to using Action Network or another database or MailChimp or whatever. I would say that primarily emails of course on Google Group don't look as nice as email sent through a mailing program or a database. And if you want to have any kind of discussion, you can't do that by just sending an email out. On the other side, if you want to be able to track data, for example, like how many people opened your email or clicked on a specific link, then you would need to do that through your database account. A lot of groups have a discussion Google Group and many groups, local groups use Google Groups for specific teams or projects, including working with other groups in coalition. Another thing that's useful about Google Groups is it makes it really convenient to grant permissions to Google Drive. So if you want to share a document or a folder with a bunch of people and they're in a group, you can just share once with that whole group and everybody gets the same permissions and the same access rather than sharing it individually with a whole bunch of people. And you can also include important links in the footer so that they show up in every email, for example, guidelines. I'm going to skip part C here, which you can read on your own time, which is really about thinking about when you would respond to the entire group versus one person. And jump now to look at the actual settings. So I'm going to go to My Groups using my app launcher here. And you come to a screen that says My Groups. You can see your recently viewed groups over here or you can click on My Groups to see all your groups. I'm going to go take a look at the local group leader group, which probably most of you on the call are in. As you can see here, you can go back and look at any of the emails that people have sent recently. Again, this is the documentation so I can go here and see that Patrick posted an email recently saying that the 100% renewable call was going to be delayed. And I wanted to look quickly at both personal settings and at the settings for the group as a whole. So these settings under My Settings are the ones that are available to any member. So you can change how your name is displayed. Most importantly probably you can change how you receive email, whether you want to get like the email every email as it comes out or you want to get a combined update so you only get generally one email a day. You can also get summaries that don't show you the whole email. You'd have to click to go read the whole email or you can just not get any updates whatsoever and just go check it out on the web page whenever you want to. Importantly, again, people can choose to leave the group if they want to basically unsubscribe there. So those are the personal emails that you have that everybody has available to them in every group that they belong to. And then as an administrator, let's check out, not seeing my settings here. Sorry, one moment, please. I see what the problem is. I have to be under Manage, I think. Yeah. Sorry about that. Things I'm not used to doing it from certain directions. If you go under Manage, these are your options as an administrator basically over here. And the first page it takes you to is just to look at all the members that are in your group and you can always select specific members and take action on them up here. So you can add people to roles. You can remove them from the group. You can change their delivery settings here even though they can change those settings on their own. But if somebody's having trouble, you can do that. And you can also change whether they're permitted to post or not right out of there. We really recommend that you use direct add members rather than invite members because it allows you to just add the person directly. A lot of times when we use the invite members, those emails tend to get lost in people's spam boxes and then they may not ever see the invite. It adds a lot of work. So as long as somebody knows that you're sending them, you know, that you're adding them to the group and it's okay with them, we highly recommend you use this. And basically you just pop in their email address and a welcome message and add them. I'm going to look at the settings area here under email options. And I'm not going to go through everything if you have any other questions you can check in with me later. This lets you change the prefix that shows up at the beginning of every email. So it identifies to people where that email's coming from and, you know, whether they need to take a look at it. It also lets you change what's in the footer of every email. So as mentioned earlier, I like to add the guidelines for the Google group so that those appear in each email. Some of the other things are not optional. You have to take them. There is a moderation section. So if you want to have a moderated group where emails are reviewed by somebody before they're posted to the group, you can choose to do that. And under permissions, you can choose what kinds of permissions people who are members of the group have. You can also look at roles. And then under information, there's just kind of basic information about the group that you want to know about. So for example, the name of the group, the email address that's used, the group description that people see, etc. The one other thing you can be aware of is under advanced is if you ever do want to delete your group, this is the button you would push. But, you know, you can't really come back from that. So don't do that unless you're ready. So those were the things we were going to go over in Google groups other than just Google group etiquette. I would just remind everybody that tone and content are important on your Google group because new people are getting added to groups all the time. And any email could be the first email that that person sees. And if it's really irrelevant, if it's mean, if it's, you know, just an unpleasant email in some way, people may unsubscribe. Or, of course, if they're just getting inundated with emails. That's why we have guidelines. I'm not going to click over to those now. But you can check those out at your convenience. All right. Why don't we see if we have any questions now? Michelle, if you can just stick them in the Slack, we can see if people have questions. So if you're in watching this on YouTube, you can just put in a question in the chat over there. And apparently Michelle is saying, if you can't use the chat box on the YouTube page, you can also put your questions over here in the chat for the document that we're looking at, the Everything Google Plus Doodle training document. All right. So far, we're not seeing any questions. So I'm just going to move forward. And, you know, we can collect, if you have any questions, you can put them in at any time. And we'll just collect them during the breaks between the different areas. Okay. All right, I'm going to close this chat for the moment. So we have a little more room. Okay. Next topic tonight is Google Drive. And so first of all, just chatting a little bit about why you use Google Drive and what it's good for. If you haven't used Google Drive much, it's a free service from Google that allows you to create, edit, and store files online and access them from anywhere that you can get to the internet, including your smartphone. The applications it has are really similar to the Microsoft Office suite of applications. So there are Google Docs that are similar to Word, Google Sheets that are similar to Excel, and Google Slides that are similar to PowerPoint. It makes having multiple people collaborate on files much easier because people can access them from anywhere. For example, many groups use them for meetings that are held by conference call. And that way people can share the agenda and the notes and see who else is participating and be able to make edits in real time that everybody can see. The sharing feature is really nice. And we're going to go look at all these things in a moment because it allows you to decide who can see the file, who can edit the file, et cetera, very easily. And it gets away from the old way of doing things where people are editing different versions of the same document and then somebody has to put them back together. It has tracking similar to Word. And it makes it really easy to store the documents. We'll talk a little bit about filing your documents and folders in a little bit. So I was going to start by, so I'm going to go to Google Drive over here, my Google Drive. And you can see that I have a couple of test folders that I created for myself. And wanted to start out by just showing you how to create a folder and move files into a folder and share after that. So to create a folder, you just go under New and you say New Folder. And I will call this yet another folder for test purposes for tonight. You'll see that your folder shows up right away. So if I want to, and I'm going to go to one of these other folders that actually has some files under it. Nope, not that one. So we can look at files. So you can see that under this particular folder, there are some files. And wanted to show you about how to upload files. So you can go to File, Upload. This is useful if you have like a PDF or a picture on your computer that you want to upload. And so I'm going to just go to my San Diego 350 file here and choose a picture of Yosemite to upload. And you'll see that, hopefully in a minute, maybe this was a big file. But anyway, you can see this was a one that I uploaded earlier. Here's a picture of Yosemite that was that we had used in San Diego. And so uploading in that fashion, uploading files is really helpful for things where you want to preserve their original format. So that might be an image, it might be a PDF file, something like that. You can also, of course, add files that belong in Google Drive. So this is how you would add a new Google Doc. Basically, it just creates a document for you. You call it what you want. And you can start typing away. I'll just leave that there for the moment. And you can see that I have a new document called Test Document. I'm not being very creative here with my no ink nature. And the other thing is, when you're uploading documents, you also have the ability, I just wanted to show you also that if you do add a document that's like in a Word format, you can choose to, so I'm going to choose this Stop Trump. I don't even know what this is here. You can choose to upload something, for example, a Word document. And then when you open it, you're given the option to change that over into a Google Doc. So this is a handy way. I'm going to wait for it to show up. But you can choose to open it with Google Docs instead. So this is a good way if you want to transfer a Word document or a PowerPoint document or an Excel document into being a, and I guess I didn't have anything in that particular file. Sorry, not very exciting. But that's how you can transfer your documents into a Google Doc if you want to use that format going forward. So I'm going to close that and go back to my folders here. I also wanted to show you how to copy folders. So any document that you have, you can either from this screen, from the folder screen, click, you can hit your right mouse button or right click and ask to make a copy here. You can also rename your file. You can also move it to a different folder. You can also just throw it in the trash. And finally, you can download it and you can download it as a Word document here also, or as a PDF. It gives you a bunch of different options. But a lot of times it's helpful to make a copy, especially if you want to, for example, let's say you have a format that you use for your press releases. And so you want to copy your last press release, but you don't want to destroy it, of course. So you can just make a copy and let, you know, share it with new people and let people edit it. So that's how you would copy it. Basically, just say make a copy. And you'll get another file here that's called copy. And you can then easily rename it, whatever you want, so that you have, you have that new copy that you can play with. You can also create subfolders. So you can have, you know, top level folders, and then you can create a folder right here. And you can do that again by pressing new. You can also right click right here and just say new folder if you want to have a subfolder. So one thing that I also wanted to cover here is that folders and documents in Google don't work exactly the same way as folders that live on your computer, because they're basically just tagged. So one feature of this, or it might be a bug for some people, is that, for example, I can have this folder called, or this document called whatever in my folder here. But if I share this document with Michelle, she might put it in a different folder. So mine's under a folder called a folder. Michelle might, if I send this document over to Michelle, she might choose to put it in a folder that's called, you know, miscellaneous files or anything else. And so documents and folders are tagged. They don't have a permanent structure. They're really just tagged. And so the same file can appear in multiple folders on different people's computers. It can even appear in multiple folders on your, you know, in your Google Drive. So just know that that's the case. However, there is only one document. So whether I share, you know, I save it in one folder, Michelle saves it in a different folder. There's still only one document. It's the same document that we're working on. And so, you know, it comes down to a knowing who owns a document. So for example, I can delete one of these documents at any point, I can just right click and say remove. And because I'm the owner of that document, that particular file is now actually deleted because it's, because I was the owner. However, if Michelle shares a document with me and I have that document in my folder here and I delete it because I'm not the owner, I'm not actually deleting that file. I'm just removing it from my folder. But that file will continue to exist in the folder of the person who actually started it. I hope that's not too confusing. I'm going to take a quick look at sharing now. So, and sharing is really an important part of how to use Google. So you can share files, you can also share folders. So if I, if I open this test document over here, and I want to share it with people, I can, if you're in the file itself and you want to share, you just go to the share button up here. And I can choose to share it with anybody so that anybody with the link can view, I can also make it anybody with the link can edit and you have other choices. I can also share, choose to share it only with specific people. I'm not going to do that now because then, well, actually, no, you're only seeing this through my screen share. So it doesn't matter. So I can, I can choose to share it only with specific people. You can see that this is already shared with Michelle. And I can choose to share it with anybody else. So like, for example, I can choose to share it with my personal Gmail account. When you choose, when you choose people to share over here, you can choose whether you want them to be able to edit the file. And if they can edit the file, they can also, unless you change the setting share it with other people, they can, you can choose to only let them comment or you can choose to only let them view. And if they have only view access, they not only cannot comment themselves, but they also cannot see the comments or tracking that other people are putting in the document. So that's how you share. Once you choose who you want to share and what permission level you want them to have, you can then hit send. You can choose not to notify people. However, if you don't notify them, then you have to send them a link separately or else they won't know that you've shared this file with them. Under advanced here, you can also choose some other options like prevent editors from changing access or adding new people and some other things. So I'm just going to say send. And then you can see that this extra person was added here. Once you have access to be able to edit a document, you can always choose yourself, whether you want to be in editing mode or suggesting mode or viewing mode. And so if you put yourself in viewing mode, you can't change anything basically. It's as if somebody only gave you view access. That's useful if you don't want to accidentally change things. You can also put yourself in editing mode in which case you can edit without tracking that. And then finally, you can also choose to put yourself in suggesting mode, which does have tracking. So I don't want this sentence or I want to add a new sentence. You'll see that this way everything's getting recorded in a comment. I can also choose to add a comment here. Insert comment. There's a bunch of different ways you can add a comment. You can also right click. One of the nice things about the comments is it now allows you to add a person. If you want to bring something to their attention, they will get an email that says you're being tagged over in this document. And you can also assign people things. So if you're using this in a meeting and you want to say this item's assigned to Joe, this item's assigned to Mary, whatever, you can just click that assigned and that person will be assigned and they will also again get an email. And also they can then go and click this to indicate that they've completed this particular task. So all those things are really convenient. And when you decide to use editing and when you decide to use suggesting is up to you, assuming you have editability in the document. But generally suggesting is helpful if you want other people to be able to see what the original language of the document was and what changes you're proposing specifically. So those are some things that are useful to note about sharing. Let me see if there was anything else here before we go on. I think that's it here. Oh, and we also just a note on when you might want to use suggesting versus comment. Often, you know, if you want to, if multiple people have the ability to edit a document or to make suggestions to a document, it can get kind of messy. And it really depends, I think, on, and this is kind of personal preference, but it depends on whether you want to be suggesting big changes to a document. Like, you know, it would be good to include this concept that's not listed here at all or this other, you know, a link to a whole other area. But if you really just want to make specific wording changes, then the suggesting, you know, using the tracking is usually the way that you want to go there. And you can also share everything in a folder. So not only documents, so I'm going to close this document. If you want to share a whole folder, it's pretty much exactly the same thing. So you right click, say, share. And I can choose who to share the folder with and what kind of access people have. One thing to be aware of there is once you share that folder, any new files in that folder will have the same permissions. So if you give people ability to edit everything in a folder, every document that you add in, people are going to be able to do that. I did want to talk a little bit also about when you might want to make your files public or not. I think that's just a conversation in your group. A lot of times groups are working on things that they might not really want to have shareable with anybody. For example, how they're feeling about a particular elected official or a particular policy that's coming out. And so there are a lot of times where you might want to keep those files private and not have them open to anybody on the web, basically. We do have an exercise here for sharing that I recommend that you take up when you have time later. And I see a question from that Michelle has slacked to me, which that's about groups that I'm going to answer in a moment. I did want to just note, so just going back to our document over here, let's see where we are, did want to note that you can look at the history of the edits. I'll show you where that is quickly and you can also print documents. So if you're in, if I'm in my test document, that was one of the documents I threw out apparently. If you're in your document over here, you can go to history and look at the revision history. So I can see when changes were made and by who at any point, and that's whether tracking was used or not. And under file, you can also download as a PDF or as a Word document or whatever, and you can also choose to print. And that's where you would change your page settings as well. So that's all we were going to cover for the moment on Google Drive. And you'll notice again, I did not look at sheets. You know, sheets are pretty much the same thing. You would just go to new and open a sheet rather than a document and you have a spreadsheet. But we don't have time to get into the details of how each program works. Again, they're very similar to the Microsoft Office Suite documents. So let me look at that question that Michelle had. I'm going to close this. And that was really about Google groups. So let me go read that. Oh, Google Docs. How to set up groups. Okay. Just if you want to start a new group, if you go back to my groups, let's see, I might have to go back a little ways for that. And I can probably do that by going here. If you're in my groups, there's just a big red button here that says create groups. That's how you would go to create a group for whoever asked that particular question. If there are any other questions on Drive right now, this would be a good time to ask them. So again, you can ask them by using the chat that's in this document here. And that's where that question is. Or you can ask the question in the chat area in the YouTube channel. And we'd be happy to answer questions. And again, you can also send us any questions you have by email later on. We're happy to answer them once you get into this. Okay. Not seeing any more questions. I'm going to jump into Google Calendar at the moment. So if I go back to here and go to my application launcher, I can choose Calendar. So this is my personal calendar or my work calendar that you're looking at. And there are a few things that I wanted to show you. So one of them is how to create a new event. So basically, you can just go and click wherever you want on the calendar. So let's say I want to, I already have a check-in with Michelle, but let's say I want to have an earlier check-in with Michelle. You can put that on my calendar here. By default, Google makes it an hour and puts it in the calendar that you're working in. But you can double click on it to edit that item. So say I want it to be an hour and a half rather than one hour. I can change that here. If I want it to be something that repeats on a weekly basis, I can say, you know, please make this on every Friday or every, you can also choose to have it be like every fourth week, or you can choose to have it happen on a monthly basis. And you can tell it when to end. So those are some of the options to have a repeating meeting. Here is where you would add your guests. So if I'm meeting with Michelle, I can add Michelle to this list and she will get a notification letting her know that I've invited her to this meeting. You can add a Google Hangout call by choosing that option, or you can put any specific instructions in here, for example, a phone number and a code, or the actual address of the meeting. So you can make all those choices and save that event. And the other thing I wanted to show you here is you can also choose which calendar it appears on. So I'm a member of a bunch of different calendars, and I can decide to put this information on any calendar that I belong to. So a lot of times, you know, you might have a calendar that's shared for a calendar for a particular team. For example, you know, say you're on a policy team, you might have one calendar and you might have your personal calendar for yourself. And so you want to just make sure that you're putting things on the right calendar. And let's see, if you want to add, if you want to look at calendars, so if you belong to, if you have Google for Google applications as a work thing, then you will be able to add other people's calendars here. But anybody can invite any other person to their calendar. And in that case, I can choose to look at those calendars here or not. And you just turn them on and off by clearing them or not clearing them. I think I don't actually have any other views this particular week. Over here, I can see that I have a, this is the list of monthly local group leader calls. Is this particular calendar? So I can turn that calendar on or off over here. And let's see, I will say that I think Google Calendar is one of the better applications. It works really easily on cell phones or at least I can say Android cell phones since that's what I have. And just wanted to talk quickly about sharing your calendar. Let's see, I have not done this in a while myself. So I can go, if I want to share my personal calendar with somebody or if I want to share, for example, calendar for your group or for your team, you can say share this calendar and you get a bunch of options there. So you can see that I've shared this calendar with my personal email address, so I can reach it from there. And you can just add people and decide whether those people can see your events or make changes to your events or share the calendar themselves with other people. That comes in handy if it's a team calendar and you want to share it with a bunch of people. And if you look under calendar details, you can see that there is HTML over here that you can embed. So for folks who have a particular calendar that they want to embed on their web page, you can use this HTML in a widget or on a page of your web page to share that calendar with other people, which really comes in handy. And I think that's always going to do on calendars today. I do have a link in here for the Google Calendar Help Center, which is really helpful if you have more questions about how to use calendar. And I do have an exercise here that I suggest you do when you have the time. I'm going to jump to Google Alerts now. I don't know how many people have used Google Alerts before, but they're really helpful ways to basically have the results of a search reported to you on a daily basis. So for example, you can get updates about a particular product you like. You can find out when people are posting things that are relevant to your group or keep up with particular news stories. And I see this question from Anonymous Tiger here saying that they don't see groups, but if you ping me about that by email, I'm happy to get on the phone with you and help you find groups in your Google area. So creating a Google Alert. So if I go back to my app launcher and I look at alerts, so I have alerts chosen here. Usually it's buried in the list of applications, so you might have to go drag it out, but it's pretty easy to find. So I have just a search that comes up that tells me when my name gets mentioned online. The easiest way to really actually set up a Google Alert is to just do a search and then tie the results of the search to a particular alert. So for example, if I want to find any reference to Minnesota 350, for example, if I Google Minnesota 350, I'll see that there are a bunch of references to them. And I can go and look at recent news stories that relate to Minnesota 350. So if I was a member of Minnesota 350, I might want to create an alert around that setting. And if I scroll down here, you can see, and I'm sorry, I'm trying to keep my web pages big so that people can actually see what I'm looking at, I can do create alert down here. So if I hit create alert, it gives me a bunch of options here. And I can choose whether I want to get information like every moment as there's a new hit for Minnesota 350. I can choose to get them once a day, once a week. You can choose whether they're coming up in news or just web references or whatever. You generally would probably want news here. And depending on how many results you're talking about, you might want to get all results and just tell to create that alert. So there's my Minnesota 350 alert, and now I will be notified every time there's a new story about Minnesota 350. Anyway, those kind of alerts are really handy for references to your group, but they can also be really handy. For example, I do a lot of work in San Diego tracking our utility, which is called SDG&E. So I can easily set up an alert for SDG&E or SDG&E in solar or community choice energy in San Diego. And again, anything that you can search for, you can make an alert for. So like for example, if we, sorry, we'll just go back here. You can have a pretty complicated search. So if I want to do SDG&E and community choice energy, I can see some new stories that come up about that and make an alert about that and get specific, specific, you know, that way I will get notified every time there's a story that comes out online that has to do with that particular topic. Anyway, alerts are a handy thing to have. And you can have as many as you want and choose how often you get specific alerts. And again, in, again, in, let's see, oh yeah, down here, I put a little resource for checking out how to use Google alerts. All right. And I'm going to skip this now, this area that's called Google account versus Gmail. I did want to just point out that I've often run into people that have problems when they have a Gmail address that's tied to their Google account. But it's not the email address they use primarily. And what can happen with that is people can have problems posting to the Google group because they'll get notified that there's an email. But if they're not logged into the correct email address, they might not be able to respond easily to it. Or same thing with files is like I've shared files with people with the email address that they use all the time for email. But it turns out that they have a different email address that's tied to their Google account. There's a really easy way and it lives under your profile to. So if you go to profile over here to, or to my account to change that, what you can do very easily is add additional emails to your Google account. So first of all, you do not need to have a Gmail address, email address to have a Google account. You can have a Google account that's tied to any email address, and you can add as many email addresses to that account as you want. And so it does not work really with calendars, I will just say calendars always present a problem and people basically have to continue to invite you using the account that's that was your Google account was created with. But for pretty much everything else for Google groups for sharing documents, it works great. And I really recommend that if you've been having any issues around that, that you that you connect your your other addresses to your Google account. Anyway. And we're going to take a quick look at Doodle, but it looks like Oh, questions. Sorry. And Michelle, if you don't mind typing those questions for me in Slack, I actually don't have that other window open since it was echoing for me. That would be great. We're in the chat in the. So I'm going to wait for Michelle on those questions and we're going to switch over to Doodle quickly since Doodle is something that people use a lot. So. So we had one question from Diane saying, is it still true that the default that when you share Google Docs that the default is view and you have to remember to give editing rights to those who you want to and I would say yes when you go to share a document. So if I wanted to share this particular document with somebody and I start actually well you can see the default when you share it broadly is view. However, the default I think down here is I think the last thing that you used here in this case it's edit. So the default when you when you make it public so that anyone with the link can view is view and you do have to go in there and choose like no I want to choose edit instead or whatever. So yeah, that is the case. And the second question I had is, is there a protocol for accessing a team calendar to make changes? So first of all, of course, and thank you that question was from Sue. So in terms of just the technical aspects of it, if you want somebody to be able to access a team calendar and make changes on it, they have to have they have to have been shared that calendar with the rights to make changes. And if the question is more around etiquette about it, I mean, I think every group can just determine, you know, like who can change the calendar and under which circumstances they should do that. But I'm not sure if that answers the question, Sue. If not, please feel free to type again with more detail. Okay, let's go take a quick look at Doodle now. So this is my Doodle account. I'm guessing that most people on the call have probably used Doodle occasionally. But I find that a lot of people are worried about setting up their own Doodle polls or, you know, scheduling options, because they tend to think it's a little more complicated than they than it really is. Doodle is a free application online. And I highly suggest that you create an account. It is a free account, because then you can go back and see, like, which which polls you have that are open, and you can also choose to get notifications when other people fill out a poll, which is those are things that you cannot do if if you don't have an account. So there are two options in Doodle, or at least in the free version. And honestly, I haven't looked at the paid version myself. You can schedule an event, or you can make a choice. So let's take a quick look at schedule an event first. So if I want to create an event in Doodle, I give it a title. So let's say it's a public policy team meeting, I can put in a location if there is one, I can say we're going to discuss endorsement of pending legislation. For example, I you have put in your name and your email address here, and then you say next, you choose which dates you want. So let's say I'm looking at next week, and we're going to do either Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I choose those dates. And you can choose any time you want. So I can say this is either going to be 5pm, 6pm, or 7pm. And you can copy and paste the first row if it's the same dates each day, or you can eliminate say on Wednesday, we're only available at five. And anyway, you choose your times, you say next. And there are some additional settings down here, but you can also finish your poll right now. I will show you those extra settings. They're pretty limited extra settings. The yes and no if need be poll basically gives you a maybe option. So if you're dealing with really busy people and you want to choose those to see those maybes, you can choose that. You can choose to only let people fill out one option, not you know, any time they can do not you wouldn't usually use that on a on a scheduling item like this, or, you know, some of these other options, I honestly just usually use the basic poll. So I would say next. This is an important point, I think personally, I would always use the finish poll and not invite people through Doodle because when you invite people through Doodle, it becomes tied to their email address. And they think you can't just send them a link and have them fill it out. You can also run into that problem if you choose only invited people to participate. So I personally would always leave it on everyone with the link and participate. And just say finish, and then just send people the link. And so, you know, you'll get a couple of emails from Doodle telling you that your that your poll has been created. And then you can go back and look at the table and you've probably mostly seen what this table looks like. So whoever receives this particular invitation can go and put their name here. And then they can fill out which dates, you know, which particular times they're available and click Save. And like I was saying before, if you have an account, one of the options is that you can be informed when other people fill out the poll, which can be handy if you're the person responsible for scheduling the meeting. And you want to get a notification every time every every time somebody fills out the poll. And so you know who to harass and who not to harass. Then you can go back and look at the poll at any time and see who's filled it out. And when you have enough people, you can select the final option and close out the poll and let people know that. So anyway, the this is the link that you would share with people basically. And you can also go back and edit the poll at any time, say one of the dates becomes unavailable, you want to add a new date, you can do that there. And as a person completing the poll, you can always choose to add a comment also. For example, you know, I'm out of town, you know, any kind of comment like that that you want to put in. So anyway, this is the this is the scheduling option. If I go back, let me see, if I go back to Doodle, yes. If I go back here, oh, let's see, this is not taking it to me. Right. If I go back here, I can now see that this is a poll that I initiated. And I can go and edit it at any time. I did want to show you the make a choice option also quickly, because it comes in handy. So say you want people to choose something, but it's not it's not about a date. It could be about, for example, you know, what type of training people want to do next. So we can do a training poll. And you can put in your description and your stuff here. And this can just be options. So I can tell people that I want them to choose which which trainings they want to try. So let's say we're going to have a campaign strategy training and a organizing training and an arts training and a Google training and and and VDA training. So say those are my options and I want people to go and try those out. If I just hit next and finish and then go look at the poll, you can see that then people can decide like which trainings they're interested in. And so they can choose more than one. And again, like before, you can choose whether you want them. This is where you might actually want to choose, only let people choose one option. Right. So and this could be also something like, you know, should we hold our picnic at this park or this park this summer or whatever, you could use anything you want here. And so it's, it's also a handy way to just do a quick poll of people. You can also do that with Google Forms, we're not going to do Google Forms tonight, but just wanted to show you how that would work in Doodle. And the one other thing I was going to point out in our document today is that is that I did have some comments down here. Well, two things. I did want to talk about Googling in general and did want to talk about Gmail a little bit here. I'm not going to cover this now, but things I get asked personally a lot about using Gmail is how to turn threading on and off, which is the bringing different emails with the same subject together, as opposed to seeing each email individually, and also how to use labels and filters. So I definitely, and also about using Gmail settings. So you can take a look at some of these options that I put here. And if you have other questions that aren't answered here, again, feel free to ask. And I just wanted to remind people that Google is really good for searching also. So that comes in handy in Drive. So like if I want to search Drive for, for example, I have a little script that I use for when I add, and probably most of you have seen this, when we add people to the Google group, I pop this language in there and I add them to it for the local group leader Google group. And you can see how easy it is for me to find that document by just doing a search within, within my Google Drive. And Google is really great for doing searches also on how to do particular things. So if you can't remember, you know, if you want to say like, how do I do this in Google Drive? You know, how do I share documents or something like that? And I don't want to be in news for that. You know, it's really easy to look for these kind of things. And I just want to remind people that those options, you know, that you can always Google things first and, and often find the answer to your question very easily here. Okay. So, and I get, we have a comment from Diane who said that when she uses doodle, she tends to include a date by when she wants people to complete the poll. Yes, you can either put that in the description of the poll itself where you can include it in like big bold letters in your email that says, please complete this poll by a certain date. But definitely yes, because otherwise people give up their dates, and then you have to start all over again. And it's not fun. Michelle, do we have any other questions at the moment? And, you know, we finished actually, I thought we were going to go for an hour and a half, but this actually ended up going a lot faster than when I was practicing it earlier. I hope I wasn't going way too fast for everybody. Sometimes the New Yorker and me comes out. But if you have any other questions, you can put them in the chat right here in the, in the documents. We're in the YouTube chat area, whichever works for you. And we'd be happy to answer anymore. All right. I'm not seeing any more questions now. So if people don't have questions, I think we can call it a night for tonight. It would be really helpful for us. So this will be a YouTube video that you can replay. You just go to the same link at any time. If you want to watch me walk through these things. I'm also really, like I said before, happy to help you troubleshoot these things. I did put this list together primarily, I would say, so that you can have something if you want to do a Google training, a basic Google training with your group, you have something to work off of, and you have some exercises built in there. I do think that actually trainings on Google or, you know, how to use various applications are often best done in person, so that whoever's leading the training can then help people doing the training to troubleshoot, you know, so people can do it hands on. I will say that when I've done this training in person, if you're planning on using a similar training, I've gotten a gazillion questions, which makes it really different than doing it this way. And it often takes a lot longer than you think it's going to, because once you get into this, people are really like, how do I do this? How do I do that? But it's also really rewarding, because then people get to try it out for themselves on the spot and have a much better chance of remembering it. So that's just a comment on that. And, okay, I have another question from Sue about whether when you create an account, you do it each time or it's permanent. I'm going to assume that that is a question on Doodle and not Google. And you would only create a Doodle account once. You would not create it each time. You just save your password and you can log in each time as the same person. And that way, again, you can go and see all the polls that you have open and not just the particular poll that you're working on, but you can see all the polls that are open and even all the polls you have going back, which is, well, I guess it's only showing you the ones that are still open. But, so yeah, so you would only create one account, basically, in Doodle is the answer to that. Okay, any other questions that people have? All right, if not, I think we will wish everybody a good night. I'm sorry I can't hear any of you tonight. That's really a bummer in this particular case. But I do hope that this was useful and I'm looking forward to seeing what feedback you have about what could have gone better with this particular training or using Google on Air and also what other things might be useful to do in this format, either because you want to learn them yourself or because it would be convenient to have some materials available for your group. And so let's see, looks like we might have one more question. No, no more questions. Okay, great. Well, have a good night, everyone. And we just want to remind you also this was a individually scheduled time because we did not hold a group leader call in June. But our usual time for the group leader monthly calls is on the second Wednesday of every month. And next week we're going to be talking about nonviolent direct action with 350.org's Matt Leonard. And we will be sending you a reminder about that. But I hope folks will join that call next week as well. Okay, thank you. Have a good night, everyone.