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Weekly Tech Tips 8 November 2020

 Dear Friends,


I hope you had a glorious weekend. I love this season, so much so that I named one of my sons after it. There is something about the fall sky and the autumn air. Adding to the crispness of the air this fall is the wind of change. These are exciting and hopeful times. The kids are back and things are beginning to feel almost normal again. Yes, things are definitely looking up.


This week I have nothing new for you, but I have some improvements. Thanks to Ms. Cindy Choi the Google Block Calendars are now complete with those crazy Friday schedules corrected. Cindy has made her blocks for the middle school schedule. I have taken what she has done and kind of generalized it. I have not deleted my old calendars and uploaded these updated sets myself yet, but I will soon. Again, any early adopters who spot any mistakes please let me know as soon as you can. Here is a zip of the corrected csv files needed to make the calendars:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iPnJfS4H4eiG5Q-J_LWiZRhNdGNBuosY/view?usp=sharing

Here is the How to Doc again, and again, let me know if you need any help with it. It is not exactly intuitive your first time around.


Weekly Tech Tips


So nothing new, but I attended a webinar on the Applied Digital Skills last week. It was a good introduction. I don’t know if there is a recording of it, but here is the slide deck from the presenter, shared with her permission:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kYvaOxeVn__mBnqOLEe-SRQhdBMdGLFcpdcISODZTUs/edit?usp=sharing

There is some good stuff in there.

Also during the presentation I learned in the chat that you can add a jamboard directly to a Google Classroom assignment. I didn’t know that. I think it’s new. So OK, one new thing.

This way you can all work on the same Jam collaboratively or as you can see, you can assign each student their own.


Been looking for that SMART Autofill feature on Sheets, but haven’t seen it yet. It was supposed to roll out 5 Nov, but the dev page says that it could take 15 days to spread around. Let me know if you see it before I do. I can’t wait to see what it can do. MAYBE it will be smart enough to make those blasted calendar files!

Here’s how to see if you have it yet:


SmartFill will detect patterns and make suggestions to help automate data entry. You can use SmartFill for tasks like extracting the first name from a given list of full names or finding values in a range or table.


SmartFill uses data in your sheet, data from your Google Workspace people directory, or knowledge available through Google’s public Knowledge Graph to detect patterns and generate suggestions.


Use SmartFill

1. On your computer, open a spreadsheet in Google Sheets.


2. Enter data and then


Mac: Press ⌘ + Shift + Y

Windows/Chromebook: Ctrl + Shift + Y

Tip: Click a cell to see the formula used.


Turn off SmartFill

1. On your computer, open a spreadsheet in Google Sheets.


2. At the top, click Tools.


3. Deselect Enable autocomplete. 


Just in case you would still like to sign up for Google for Educators Certification Training, the form is here:

https://forms.gle/9Earqqf8nj3EUvkp8

I will be in touch about the sessions before the holidays.


Be happy and have a great week!

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