FTT - Beginner Tips for School Gmail

You've Got Mail!

5 Beginner Tips to Get You Started with Gmail

@LisaBerghoff/@joe_edtech

As we make our way through the transition from Outlook to Gmail, we will continue to provide you with resources, tips and tricks. Many of you are figuring these out on your own and it's exciting to see colleagues sharing their new knowledge with one another. As a reminder, please use the Outlook To Gmail website, created by Ron K. You can find it by clicking this link. I recommend that you bookmark it by clicking on the star located in the URL bar in Chrome. 

Here are 5 Tips To Get You Started...

1. Know How To Get To Your Mail

Gmail is web-based, which means you can access it from any device on the internet. You can get to it by opening a browser tab, preferably in chrome, and click on "mail".

You also have the option to get to it from your apps doc. If you add the gmail app from the chrome store, you can pin it to the taskbar on the bottom of your screen.

2. Set Up Your Signature

This is a great first step because it will help you learn how to go into the settings menu. You just click on the gear in the upper right corner of the mail screen and click settings. Don't be overwhelmed by what you see there. There are many options in gmail and you have plenty of time to explore and check them out, pace yourself! You will notice that you are in the "general" tab of the settings page. Scroll down almost to the bottom of the page and you will see where to add your signature. Yes, you can copy and paste your old Outlook signature in your gmail signature box. After entering your signature, scroll to the bottom and click "save changes"

3. Learn How To Set Vacation Notifications

It's almost vacation time! Make sure you go back into settings by clicking on the gear and click "settings". Stay on the general tab of settings and scroll to the bottom of the screen where you will see "vacation responder".

You can add your vacation message in the box and set the dates for that message to be automatically sent as a reply to your incoming email messages.

4. Get Yourself A Reading Pane and Mini Calendar

This one is very polarizing. People either love the reading pane or they hate it. I'm in the love it category so I was excited to see how easy it is to set it up. Click on the gear and click settings. Then, click the "labs" tab. You can enable or disable these features. Here, you will see the preview pane and the Google calendar gadget. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click to save your changes. Then, when you go to your gmail inbox, you will click the icon just to the left of the gear and click "vertical split"

This will add your preview pane. You can adjust the size of your preview pane by clicking and dragging the line that separates the pane from the list of messages.

5. Choose A Theme

Is there a specific color that makes you happy? Maybe you have a vacation photo that makes you smile. Set a theme for your gmail by clicking on the gear and clicking "themes". You can choose an existing theme or use one of your own photos. You can adjust the contrast for your text background, blur or darken the edges of your theme. 

These first steps should help get you started in the world of gmail. I know that intially it may feel like trying to cram a square peg in a round hole, but I believe that this is an opportunity for us to work together and learn from one another. It's so interesting to me to learn the different styles and preferences people choose for their email. It also gives me pause and makes me reflect on what it was like to teach without email at all. The fact that we can communicate with each other, our students, parents, and community members at lightning fast speeds still amazes me. We've come a long way!

Have you found some new and favorite features in gmail? Feel free to share below. 

FTT - Google Calendar

Getting Started With Google Calendar

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

Even before I started in District 113, I've had teachers and administrators ask me about the best way to take advantage of digital learning platforms. There are tons of great things to do, but my experience tells me that the biggest game changer is the ability to share live digital calendars with our students. As an adult, I have grown to rely on calendar reminders, emails, and text messages to remind me of important upcoming events. I know that a simple calendar with due dates and test dates would have made me a better student in high school. 

That's why I was always stunned by the fact that we had teachers and staff on one digital platform and our students on another. In order to share calendars with students, we were asking our teachers to live in two different digital worlds. Our switch to Gmail changes all of that and I'm really excited about the possibilities.

There is too much to know about Google Calendars to share everything in one post, but today I want to focus on what I believe are most important things to get started using Google Calendar well: settings, sharing, viewing and hiding calendars, editing events.

Settings:

Every Google App has its own settings so that you can customize it to work the way you'd like:

There are two ways to get to your calendar settings. The first is to click the pull down menu bar from "My calendars" on the left hand side of the screen:

Or, as with every Google App, you can click the settings gear in the upper right hand corner:

The first thing I changed in settings was "Default event duration." In Outlook, the default for a meeting was always 30 minutes. I like to events set at 60 minutes. But you have several different choices. However, the most important part about settings has to do with how you view your calendar. I like to look at it this way:

I want to see the whole week, including Saturday and Sunday, at one time. Notice at the top of Google Calendar, you can choose to look at your calendar by Day, Week, Month, 4 Days, or as an Agenda. However, one of those will be a default view. In other words, every time you open your calendar it will default to...something. I like the Week view. But in settings, you can choose any of them.

You can also set a Custom view for your calendar. If you only want to see a five day calendar, you can make that a Custom view and then set that as your default.

Sharing Your Calendar:

You can change share your calendar with colleagues, spouses, or students by clicking on the pull-down menu bar next to your individual calendar and selecting "Share this Calendar" from the list:

I don't expect everyone to be as open and public as I am, but my calendar is shared with anyone who wants to see it. People who add my calendar can only see when I'm free or busy, and they can't make any changes to my calendar, but anyone can see my calendar. By default, we should share our calendars within District 113 with free/busy times so that admin assistants and department chairs can see your calendars and propose meetings during common free times.

But, you can also choose to share your calendar with individuals. In the example I've included below, I've shared my calendar with several of my colleagues and my personal Gmail account with different permission levels. If someone sets appointments for me, I want them to be able to see all events and be able to edit events.

Viewing Calendars:

In the example calendar I posted above, I can actually see 3 calendars at one time. The first is my normal work calendar, which shows my scheduled school events. The second is my calendar for home, which shows when my daughter's concerts and school events are, when my wife or daughter has something important planned for us to do, and when I need to mentally prepare for family coming to visit (this shared home calendar has prevented many arguments and created some measure of family peace - I highly recommend a shared calendar at home). The third calendar doesn't have many events on it, but it is the most important. It shows when I have tickets to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. For easy differentiation, my work events are in grey. My home events are in red. And my Star Wars events are in Orange.

You can hide or view your different calendars by clicking on their titles on the left hand side of your Calendar screen. In the example below, I can see the Joseph Taylor, Birthdays, Brian Verisario, and DHS Library calendars. However, the Free Tech Tools Tuesday calendar is hidden (The color block is white and the text is greyed). 

If I click on the Birthdays, Brian Verisario, and DHS Library calendars, they will be hidden from my overall view. But all I have to do is click them again to make them reapper. If you decide that you want to get rid of a calendar, or if you want to change the default color for a calendar, take your mouse and hover over the particular calendar, then select the pull down menu for the calendar:

From here you can select "Hide this calendar from the list," which means it won't appear on your calendar or in your list of calendars any more. Or, you can simply choose a new color for easy differentiation.

Editing Events:

While you can do an event quick add by simply clicking on the calendar and typing in the name of an event, you can add a ton of information and invite other people to events by clicking the "Edit event" button.

 

At the top, you can add a title, change the date and/or time, or make the event an "All day" or "Repeating" event. You can also put the event on a different calendar. For instance, I could use the pull down bar next to Calendar to add this to my home calendar instead of my work calendar. You can add a description, add an attachment (especially useful if your are using this with students), color code individual events and add guests. My favorite part about Google Calendar, though, is the fact that you can decide what notifications to add - and how frequently. And I can choose to be notified by email, web browser, or SMS text notification.

By the way, I would love to be able to set the calendar so that all of my students can be notified of major events through SMS text messaging - but I can't. These are individual settings. However, in calendar settings, everyone can set up default notifications. So, you can walk your class through that process or send a short hand out home so that parents know that kids can set up text notifications.

These are just the basics for getting started. There is a lot more information to come, and both schools will be setting up hands on training sessions in the very near future.