Book Creator | Too Suite - Top Tips for G Suite Tools during Distance Learning

Too Suite

Top Tips for G Suite Tools
during Distance Learning

Daren White, EdTech Lead & Google Certified Trainer

@Rangathetrainer

Foreword

Welcome to Too Suite. As a teacher of over 20 years, I have been fortunate to work with some fantastically inspiring students and teachers but I had never been a technically minded or motivated kind of person.

All this changed one day when my school introduced Google Apps for Education (now G Suite) thanks to the foresight of a former student, colleague and good friend Dean Stokes.

As a member of Senior Leadership at the time, G Suite changed my life and I could instantly see different and better, more streamlined and efficient ways of working both in and out of the classroom.

A flame ignited and, being fortunate to share an office with Dean, I began to discover more and more about the benefits of G Suite across the board, for work and home life.

I am now a Google Certified Educator and Trainer, I am Learning Technologies Lead for 2 large secondary academies and am a lead Innovator for our Trust, one of the largest in the UK.

I have had the privilege of leading training to schools and individuals across the world thanks. This is largely thanks to Dean and Ben Rouse who invited me to deliver my first ever G Suite Bootcamp for Appsevents, and to my very supportive bosses, John, Emma, Damian and James who afforded me the opportunities to advance my passion.

I hope this book gives you some useful and workable ideas. Remember, I wasn't a 'techy', I was a language teacher and I learnt what I know from playing and pressing buttons. Be inquisitive and don't say "I haven't got time" because if you invest the time, you'll save double that in the long run.

Google Classroom

Google Classroom is a superbly simple Learner Management System. Here are some top tips to make managing your Google Classroom easy and efficient.

Organise your lessons into topics in the classwork tab. This will help keep things clear for you and students. I name my topics "Week beginning..." during distance learning.

Create a topic called Archive. Move old assignments into it and keep it at the bottom of the Classwork page.

In your settings, hide assignment posts from the stream to keep things tidy. Your stream is for announcements, not work.

Create a practice classroom with a dummy student or a colleague so you can see the student view. This gives you a safe space to experiment and practice.

When assigning documents, choose "Make a copy for each student". That's how classroom works best!

Use the To Do list (behind the 3 horizontal lines, top left) to manage your marking

Convert PDFs to Google Slides, not Docs.

Create and grow your comment bank to speed up marking.

Explore and create your own rubrics (markschemes) for clarity and next steps.

Include the class code in assignment titles so you can create filters in Gmail for all notifications easily.

GMail

Your Gmail inbox is exactly that, yours. There is no
right or wrong way to organise your Gmail, it's a personal preference. These are some of my recommendations.

First step, choose your inbox style in the settings cog. You have a range of choices.

In general settings, change Undo Send to 30 seconds, not 5.

Also in settings, enable Smart Compose to let Gmail's AI do some of the work and finish your sentences for you.

Create labels to categorise your emails. You can apply multiple labels to the same email.

Create filters to automatically file your emails and even skip your inbox (great for notifications from Google Classroom eg, create filters for emails containing different class codes)

Compose your email whenever you like but use Schedule Send so it arrives to the recipient during work hours

When creating a filter, click filter messages like these

Google Docs

Google Docs is your standard document platform but that
doesn't mean it's the only place you can create docs. However it does have some great features. Here are some top tips for making the most of Google Docs

Share docs with up to 200 people to collaborate on the same document at the same time. No need for personal copies!

Use paragraph styles to generate automatic hyperlinks in the document outline

Use voice typing to save your fingers. Works in many languages.

In the tools menu, easily create a translated version of any document.

Display the word count in the bottom left corner for restricted answers.

Use different document formats to edit, suggest and view

Use version history to see previous version of your doc, who has edited and how. Restore a previous version easily.

Name your document versions eg "original" so you can restore to fresh in one click.

Use Explore and click the " to autogenerate footnotes and citations.