As part of the White House’s ConnectED initiative Safari Books Online has teamed with O’Reilly Media to offer free access to hundreds of eBooks. To access the books you will need a verified Edmodo or Clever account (I haven’t figured out what they mean by a “personal” log in that is an option). One downside is…
Sometimes when placing text on a slide in a presentation, the background image can make it hard to read the text. Other times you’d like your text to stand out a little bit from the document. This is where drop shadows come in handy. Basically this trick relies on two text boxes, each with the…
I’ve mentioned in the past about using Pushbullet to send links, text and other information to your students. Yesterday, Google announced the Google Tone. This adds a new icon in the toolbar that when pressed, emits a series of tones that other browsers with the extension installed will hear. I’ve tried it out at home, and…
With the WebRTC Desktop Sharing extension installed in Chrome, you can share your desktop with other Chrome browsers with just a link. Once the extension is installed, you can click on the icon it places in your toolbar to start sharing your screen. You will need some way to get the link to your students….
Over the years I’ve played around with easy ways to collect and search information, but never really satisfied with the outcome. Last week I had the idea to try to use GMail as a journal, and so far it is working pretty well. Why GMail? I wanted something that was frictionless to use. What do…
Most email providers offer subaddresses (often times call plus aliases) allowing the user an almost infinite number of addresses. Subaddresses are part of the email protocol and were devised as a way to filter email. To use a sub address, you simply add +ALIAS between your username and the @ sign in your email. For example,…
There are times when you are using a Google Sheet, such as collecting information in a form, where you would like highlight the minimum and maximum cell in a column. Google Sheets offers conditional formatting, which gives you the ability to change the formatting of a cell based on the contents of the cell. For…
One complaint I hear about Google Docs is the difficulty in adding clipart to a document. Well, Openclipart to the rescue! This add on for Google Docs adds a sidebar to search clipart. To get the add-on, open a Google Doc and click on Add-ons -> Get Add-ons: In the search box, type openclipart: Then click on the…
Google held an online conference this past weekend and has now put up the footage of each of the presentations. There are keynotes from Tia Lendo, Michelle Obama, and LeVar Burton along with some very fascinating sessions. I’ve embedded a few of my favorites, but you’ll probably want to visit the website! (The first two…
Yesterday’s post was all about launching Chrome apps from the toolbar. But what if you want to start a new document in Google Drive from the toolbar? Sure, you can use AppJump to launch Docs, Slides, or Sheets, but then you’re still stuck hitting the + in the lower right to create the document. There are two…