Wait, How Did You Do That?

The above image was created with Canva's text to image AI

@LisaBerghoff

There are many times during my time at school where I am in the middle of doing something and I hear, "Wait, how did you do that?". I know lots of great ways to get things done using technology, mostly because I am perpetually curious. Typically when I am asked that question there is not time to show how I did it because I am in the middle of demonstrating something, working with a class, or just at a time where there is no time. I want to circle back with each of you and show you individually but that is impossible so I decided to post a few here.

Here are some of the most recent- Wait, how did you do that? moments. 

Enjoy!

1. Use your phone as a clicker to advance slides using Remote For Slides or Canva.

I have owned several remote clickers for my computer. I tend to lose them, break them, or run out of batteries for them. Please don't judge me! Anyway, I always have my phone on me and I have been very happy with the Remote For Slides chrome extension. 

How To Do It:

1. Start by clicking here to get to the Chrome Webstore and add the extension to your Chrome profile.  

2. Open your Google slides presentation and choose: Present With Remote.

3. This will open your slides in presentation mode. Click the arrow on the right side of your screen to open the Remote For Slides panel.

4. Click to view the 6 digit code. (make sure to do this before you're connected to the projector so your students don't see it)

5. If you have an android phone, you can use the Remote For Slides app, or go to RemoteForSlides.com on your phone's browser, and enter the code.

You're good to go!

2. Share a link to specific text on a webpage.

We all know how easy it is to share a link with students or with colleagues. You can easily add a link to your materials page in Schoology and we can email or Google chat links to each other. However, when you grab the link from the URL bar (called the omnibox) you are sending the recipient to a webpage and counting on them to find the spot you want them to see. Did you know that you can create a sharable link that goes directly to specific highlighted text on a page?

How To Do It:

1. In Chrome, go to a page with text you want to share.

2. Highlight the text you want to share.

3. Right click on the highlighted text and select Copy Link To Highlight. If you don't see this option, it might not be available on the selected content.

4. Share the link by posting it in Schoology, emailing it, adding it to a doc, or however you want to share it.

To remove the highlight, right click the highlighted text and select Remove Highlight.

3. Create custom header images for Google forms, or anything really.

No offense to Google, but the image options in the Google Forms header gallery are pretty tired. When people fill out my form I want it to look customized. A customized Google form header signals to the person filling it out that this form is so important you took the time to customize it. This is easily done in Canva.

How To Do It:

1. Open Canva.com and sign in using your school Google credentials.

2. Next to "What will you design today?" click on Custom Size and enter 1600X400

3. Format your design and download as a png. 

4. On your Google form, click the theme (paint pallet) icon at the top and 

click Choose Image. 

5. Click upload and click and drag or click browse to locate your png that you just downloaded. Click done and enjoy.

4. Send an email or chat message to all attendees of a calendar event. 

Need to let the group know fast that the location of your meeting has changed? Are you running late and need to notify everyone in your meeting? You can do this quickly and easily from Google calendar. 

How To Do It:

1. In Google calendar, navigate to your calendar event/meeting.

2. Single click on the event to open the event details. 

3. Click on the chat icon or the email icon and craft your message and click send. If it's a chat message, Google chat will open in a new window. 

5. Quickly and easily access docs and files that have been shared in Google Chat Spaces.

Course teams and departments are making good use of Google Chat Spaces. Spaces allows for the ability to collaborate, share files, assign tasks, and review message history. You can also reply in threads in so you can more easily follow conversations. People often share links to docs, sheets, or other files in Spaces and if your group is very active, it can be frustrating to find those files. Spaces actually is already set up for you to both easily access files AND assign tasks.

How To Do It:

1. Navigate to your Google chat space by clicking the chat icon on the left toolbar of gmail.

2. Towards the bottom, view and click on one of your spaces.

3. At the top of your Space screen you will see three tabs: Chat, Files, Tasks.

4. Clicking on "files" will give you access to all files that have been shared in that space. You can also add a file within that tab and it will appear in the chat window.

5. Clicking on "tasks" will give the ability to assign tasks to members of the Space. Those tasks will appear on that person's Google task list and if there is a date and time added, it will also add to their calendar.

What did I miss? What are your favorites that people ask you- How did you do that? Are there any that you are hoping to learn? I'm happy to work with you and show you more!