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Weekly Tech Tips 22 August 2021

 Dear Friends,


Do you notice anything … different about me? Don’t I look spiffy this week in my new threads? I picked ‘em up courtesy of Smore. It’s a newsletter app I just learned about and I thought I’d try it on for size. Of course, gathering the  latest and highest quality tech tips on the web (almost) every week for my dear friends takes hours, Days, WEEKS of endless toil 😜 , but it only took a few minutes to drop my newsletter into this web-based template wizard to produce these stunning results for this week’s....


Weekly Tech Tips

Are you digging Google Smart Canvas tools yet? I am, and here’s a new one for smart dates. Just type ‘@’ and then either click the date on the popup or keep typing a date and you get a 

smart chip like this:

It allows you to see a drop down calendar and open your calendar to book a meeting. It’s easy enough to try, just open a doc and type the ‘@’ symbol to see all the file, contact and now date options that you have. You can also read more about it here:

A new Google Docs shortcut you need to notice





I can envision a couple of use cases for this. It could be useful for parent teacher conferences or departmental meetings. I am going to try it out on my Office Hour Sign Up Sheet which you can try as well. Even if we are 100% on campus, I and many others think that online office hours are one of the keepers from the pandemic way of teaching. The smart chip allows me to just click it to schedule a meeting that also appears in my calendar. 

Unfortunately, I no longer receive a notification that someone has edited the document like I did when it was a Google Sheet. SO I will try linking it to a sheet that when updated will email me. Setting up notifications that a shared sheet has been edited is easy to do. In the Sheet go Tools>>Notifications and choose the rules. Hit Save.


Or you can try an app like ezNotification for Docs if you like. 




This Week’s Apps, Articles and Resources


A bit late I know, but then we did seem to start earlier than most. This comprehensive and colorful Google for Education Back to School Guide 2021 is a bit hefty at 18 pages, but it is well organized and hyperlinked to areas that might interest you.


Just in time for Back to School Night. Some addons to spruce up your Zoom meetings. Remember, some addons may slow throughput especially at school with everyone on zoom at the same time so use with caution and test it out first. You can read all about them in my man JR’s 4 minute Article at Fast Company or check them out from this list from the same article:



That’s it for this week. Hope there was something helpful for you in here. I just wanted to send a shout out to the folks who have been sharing lately; particularly Mr. John Kwon and Ms. Colleen James. Thanks guys!


Have a great week!

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