Sound familiar? I hear ya! In my role as an instructional facilitator, I spend a lot of time responding to emails, and a lot of them are time sensitive because teachers reach out and I want to give them answers quickly. On top of that, I follow the Inbox Zero philosophy, wherein I try to have zero unread emails in my inbox at any given time, and make it a personal goal to have no more than 10 emails in my inbox, total. Yes, I understand this makes me a crazy person, but I get very overwhelmed otherwise. Gmail has a couple of features, one already available and one coming soon, to help manage your email life. The first one, Snooze, has been out for about a year, and it has saved my life, ya'll. All you have to do is select the checkbox on an email in your inbox or have the email open, click on the little clock icon at the top, and select the time you want to snooze the email until (see image below). I use it ALL. THE. TIME. I may get an email from someone, respond to it, and then know I need to follow up, so I'll snooze the email until the time where I need to follow up. Or I will snooze one of the million edtech blog emails I get until a time that is more convenient. The email "goes away" until that time, when it nicely pops back up in my inbox and has a yellow note saying it had been snoozed. You can always see what you've snoozed in the left-hand column of your email under Snoozed. The other feature, which is coming soon to your inbox, is the Send Later feature. This will allow you to compose an email to someone and have it send later. Need to send a reminder email about parent teacher conferences next week and don't want to forget? Select Send Later! Wake up in the middle of the night and remember you need to send an email? Send Later, and then you don't have to worry about the recipient's inbox dinging in the middle of the night. I know Send Later will help me out just as much as Snooze has, and hopefully you can see uses for them as well!
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Happy April, everyone! Today I wanted to let you know about an exciting update to Google Slides. In Google's official G Suite stream of updates, they announced that Google Slides is finally getting audio! It's a slow rollout, so we don't have access yet, but hopefully it will be soon (I'm hoping by the end of April). Much like inserting an image into a slide, you will go to Insert > Audio and select a file (MP3 or WAVE) from your Google Drive. You can use music that you already have (be careful with copyright, though), or you can use free stock music. YouTube has a great library of free stock music that you can download, or if you just Google free stock music, there are many sites you can visit to find audio. Once inserted, you have options to play the audio for a specific slide, or have it run through the whole slideshow. You can adjust the volume and also have it play automatically or upon a click while in presentation mode. This feature will be a great addition to Slides. I have had a lot of teachers ask me about how to do slideshows with photos and music toward the end of the year, so they can showcase all of the fun things that have happened throughout the year. Before, PowerPoint was a better option, but now Google Slides can be the way to go! If you pair it with the Photo Slideshow Add-on in Slides, you can easily upload photos you have saved in Google Drive or Google Photos. Each photo goes to its own slide without you having to do it manually! When you are ready to present, you can go to File > Publish to the Web and use the link they provide to have your whole slideshow playing on an automatic loop. This way you can have the music and slides play without you having to click through it! Below is a screenshot of the options you have for publishing. You could also have students utilize this new feature and use a screencasting tool like Screencastify or Loom to have them record their own narration along with their slides and music.
Have any other ideas of how to use this upcoming feature? Comment below! |
AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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