Skip to main content

Weekly Tech Tips 5 September 2021

 Dear Friends,


Come take a Drive through the Cloud with me in  this week’s installment of...


Weekly Tech Tips

Google has been going through a lot of changes recently, as Google is wont to do, and even more are on the way. You may have seen messages about being 18 years old on Youtube or new security settings on your files and folders in Drive. Mr. Kwon and I should have the Youtube restriction taken care of. The new Drive settings are due to be implemented on Monday 13 September. For weeks now Drive has probably been notifying you that changes are on the way. You can see which files and folders will be affected by clicking “See Files” at the bottom of the notification. I have done this and it looks like only a few of my files will be affected. If the notification is no longer appearing you can search for them with  “is:security_update_applied” in the search bar of Drive. 

What does it mean? It means that some of your older shared links (Google native files like docs, sheets, and forms are not affected) might break and you will have to reshare them with the new encryption key (embedded in the new link). You can get it all straight from the horse’s mouth right here: Security update for Google Drive - Google Drive Help. I don’t think most people will be impacted too much; admins might, but we might all end up having to reshare a few links.

Back up & Sync is being replaced AGAIN with Drive for Desktop (which is what it was called 4 years ago 😔 ). We will all have to “upgrade” to that soon as well, assuming you used this in the first place. It allows you to sync your cloud-based Drive files with local-based hard drive copies. It’s also the only way to copy folders in Drive, by using your OS’s file management app (Preview or Windows Explorer).

Another update rolling out between 14 Sept and 1 Oct is Offline Mode. Google says, “When you mark these files available offline, you can easily open these files from your browser even when you aren’t connected to the internet …non-Google files such as PDFs, images and Microsoft Office files will need to be opened using apps installed on your computer through Google Drive Web when offline ”. You should start seeing the option to make certain files viewable offline in the coming weeks. More from the source here: View & open files - Google Drive Help.

Is this all making your head a little cloudy? Ready to seek sunnier skies? Well there are always alternatives. There are of course options like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud etc.. We already have many gigabytes of school data on Google Drive so it isn’t like we are going to abandon it at school, but if you are interested in a new cloud-based storage solution for yourself you maybe interested in Internxt. They have great deals on secure data storage packages that easily work with all the above mentioned platforms. You get 2 GB free, 2TB for $10 a year, or 10TB for life for a one-time payment of 300 euros. 

Alright, that was a pretty “cirrus” dive into the nebulous world of Google Drive. Time to get our heads out of the clouds and get back down to Earth where … robots are stealing our jobs!



Articles

AI and ML are coming to the classroom very soon. The EAL classroom may be one of the first to feel their impact. Here is a primer:

An Edtech User's Glossary to Speech Recognition and AI in the Classroom



That’s all for this short and cloudy-with-a-chance-of-robots edition of Weekly Tech Tips. Please do let me know if I missed any choice cloud puns, and have an awesome early autumn week!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Tech Tips 29 August 2021

  Dear Friends, Welcome to this week’s installment of... Weekly Tech Tips This week is all about speed. See below how you can take a flat file MC quiz and pretty quickly turn it into a  Quizziz. Quizziz is also adding adaptive practice which is nice. Notice how you can copy over ALL the MC options then drag down one at a time to populate the choices instead of copying each one over. I was able to make this 13 question MC quiz from an IB database in about 10 minutes.  So now when I give this quiz tomorrow I don’t have to worry about making copies or if the printer works or forgetting about it because I already scheduled it for exactly 10 minutes after class starts. And my favorite part is that when the student are done I get a fantastic report like this: that tells me not only who missed what, but provides some basic item analysis. I also like the fact that the question pops up in the report so I don't have to note the question and go back to the quiz to find it. Solid...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 9 May 2021

Dear Friends, Man how time flies when you have 1001 things to do!  Weekly Shortcuts  You have to know that if you ever accidentally close one or more tabs in Chrome that you can get them back with CMD + SHIFT + T. You can do this multiple times to get back tabs you may have closed earlier and need back. If you need to go farther back, go over to your history under the “snowman” (three vertical dots in the upper right corner of your browser). Weekly Tech Tips I keep the focus on spreadsheets again this week. I mentioned last week that it's spreadsheet time of year and I think that is the case whenever it's time to log scores and calculate final grades. I don't know of any of my colleagues who use Schoology or PowerSchool to actually calculate grades. I'm not sure how the elementary teachers keep up with it, but as far as I know everyone in secondary has some version of their own spreadsheet to manage all the calculations required by the IB (Intentionally Byzantine?)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 7 March 2021

  Dear Friends, I hope you are happy. Weekly Shortcut Ever need a scratch pad to work out a calculation or idea on? Especially during grading season I always find that a scratch spreadsheet comes in handy if I am looking at grades and different ways to calculate them. A scratch spreadsheet is always up when I am doing grades. It lets me quickly and accurately copy my grades over from my gradebook and run any calculations or stats I want without fear of messing up my actual gradebook. Instead of going into the matrix (the nine dots in the upper right-hand corner of most Google App windows) or going into Drive and clicking the rainbow plus New button, you can just open a new browser window and type:  sheet.new. You can create a new blank doc with doc.new and yes a new blank slide presentation with slide.new These are by default stored in the upper level of My Drive. If you do this enough you might like to save another step and just make new sheets and docs a part of your New T...
Post a Comment
Read more