A voice to listen to a Voice to be heard

The following slides show

• why adding audio to slides add accessibility
• how you can easily record it on a chromebook
• the adding it process and
• how to share

Delete multiple page - Classic Google Sites

So for a long time I have been frustrated by having to delete pages in google sites I work with. Tidying up was a tedious process where each page needed to be entered an then deleted. There was no opportunity to select multiple pages and delete going through the manage site menu. Long story short - Move the pages under one page and then delete that page to get rid of them all. Video below.

Restore contacts - Gmail Help

I kindly offered to send a friend a group of contacts in Google. I unfortunately sent her my whole contact list of 1291 rather than a group of 18.

Restore contacts

If you make changes to your contacts that you want to undo, you can restore your full contacts list to an earlier saved version. This allows you to undo changes like:

• Recovering contacts that have been accidentally deleted
• Restoring contacts after an unsuccessful sync
• Undoing a recent import
• Undoing a recent merge

To restore your contacts to a previous version, just follow these steps:

1. Click Contacts.
2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
3. Choose the time you'd like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you'd like to return to where you started.
4. Click Restore. You'll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

To undo a restoration:

• When the operation completes, a notification bar will appear that gives you the opportunity to immediately undo the restore. This notification bar will disappear if you leave Contacts or make edits to your contacts.
• If the notification bar is no longer there, you can always re-run the Restore Contacts tool to take you back to where you started. Just set the tool to take you to the time just before you started the whole process.

The 24 hour rule for Chat contacts:
When you delete a contact in Contacts, it will also get deleted from your Chat list. After the contact is deleted, Chat still remembers the invitation status for that contact for another 24 hours. So if you restore a deleted contact within 24 hours, it will be fully restored in Chat. But if you restore a deleted contact after 24 hours, you'll need to re-invite that person to your Chat list.

Restore contacts - Gmail Help

Set Gmail as Your Browser's Default Email Client with a Simple Hack

Set Gmail as Your Browser's Default Email Client with a Simple Hack

Took me a couple of goes but this from Lifehacker is easy. One important note, do this from a gmail window, and then when you click the link, that has to be in the same browser (or shut all windows and reopen) as you just applied the "try this" link.

Something Special about Google spreadsheets

I am not sure how many times I'm going key use Google spreadsheets in the way that this video from John Thomas shows but regardless of that I'm impressed. What the video really shows is that Google tools go deep: they search, they connect, they interact.
I've been trying to model the application shown but had forgotten how to make the column reference sticky with a $ thanks for that too John.

Might also say I don't think Google are done here I look forward to the day where I can use with in a spread sheet searches for relationships. The first few searches that come into my mind are:

1. Wars, countries involved, civilian casualties, primary issues
2. Inventions, year patent registers, major impact, formal training of inventor
3. Sports, number of players in world, calories burned per hour by athletes, size of playing field
4. Race, average life expectancy, infant mortality, most common religion

While these didn’t quite work out for me YET it was fun trying and not only that it made me think.
Sometimes I feel that thinking is better than having the right answer. Thinking brings us a relationship with our information.

Wanting Gmail to be the default mailto: program

Sometime there is a link a webpage fro an email reply or address that I want to send to. What has been hapeening is my linkclicking will start up Outlook a program I now no longer use.  I have come across Google's Gmail notifier, which has helped me make Gmail my default mail client, which means it will open a Compose window when I click on a web page email link. Here’s how you do it adapted from Lifehacker

Download and install the free Gmail notifier

. In Windows, right-click the Notifier icon in your system tray, and select 'Options.' Then check the box next to 'Use Gmail for internet mailto: links' and click 'OK.'

Mac users, in Gmail Notifier Preferences, go to 'Settings,' and select Gmail from the 'Default Email Program:' drop-down menu, like this:

When we make it real…

Being back from Sydney for a while now trying to decode try to work out exactly what happened at Google teacher Academy and what it meant. I really enjoyed being in a larger city and especially one so beautiful and vibrant. A visitors experience will be different to a locals.

Our look at google maps and google earth was inspiring. “Our Earth” is a learning bonanza. Thanks Wendy Gorton. Perhaps as a result of this being in this new environment I found the maps information captivating. On reflection maybe other reasons like my long held belief in the power of visual language play a part. Below in a narrated Google Earth Tour I talk about some ways we learn through map/earth exploration.

GTASYD from Media team on Vimeo.

Here is a video of howto make a Tour in Google Earth

Finding Unread messages in Gmail

With a large inbox it can be hard to find all you unread messages Tech-recipes have a method for doing this that I have adapted here and made a quick video to show how.

1. Go to Your Gmail account
2. In the Search box at the top of the page, input the following:
label:(unread inbox)
3. Click the Search button

A list of all unread emails located in the Inbox will appear.

If you need to do this frequently, you can save time by Making a quick link

1 Go to you email settings and search labs for the quick links feature and enable it.

2 While having the unread mail up as above add a quicklink by clicking add a link on the gmail side bar. You can then always bring up unread mail easily.

Here is a video showing the process.

Finding Unread Gmail from Media team on Vimeo.

A little more info here about how you can achieve the same thing for mobile

1. Open Gmail for Mobile.

2. Select Menu.

3. Select Search Mail.

4. Input label:(unread inbox) and select Search.

A list of all unread emails located in the Inbox will appear.

So You're Married Now

Google Apps for Edu is being widely adopted by an education community recognising the capacity of collaboration to improve outcomes for organisations. This is a developing ecosystem with some of the administration tasks we have been used to with active directory taking place in different ways with different tools. This can be complicated when organisations decommission exchange servers in favour of this cloud-based solution. One of the teachers at my school got married and took her husband's name. We wanted to change her name while retaining all of her documents and e-mail. We have been using Google-sync but needed now to change the account name in Google before resynching  to it with an alias address so that she could receive mail from people using her maiden name.

Changing names

The product we used is the Google Apps Manager. There are a couple of steps to installation and then you need to follow the syntax examples to ensure that the naming you want takes place. We did this to rename the teacher with a new married name after which we could connect to her correctly from active directory where we also changed her name. I wasn't aware of the ability to create an e-mail alias using the same utility but it is there. This your only option that I know about should you have decommissioned your exchange server like we have. Good luck and I look forward to hearing your Google apps manager stories.

Start here at the wiki

Google search Tips

I was Looking for a quick reminder about the power of Google search and my friend Barbara Reid sent a link to a Google site where I found this. I’m keeping it handy as i find it takes a few revisits before something like this sinks in. What this has reminded me of is the power of search literacy in helping people be productive in their use of the web. I am one global citizen who backs Google’s removing itself from China on the basis of the information censorship being exerted on Chinese citizens. Click on the Play button and maximise the screen if you want to.

Google Search Tricks on Prezi