Gmail
Email is used extensively for school communications. Sometimes you may need to email out the same message to all your students or their parents. In order to personalize the emails or make them relevant to the individual, sometimes an email merge is required. Two add-ons that may be helpful include Yet Another Mail Merge and FormMule. Both of these take data that is stored in a spreadsheet and use text placeholders to merge that information into the body of an email. Yet Another Mail Merge uses emails saved in your Gmail Drafts as a template. FormMule has more options including the ability to send a variety of email templates based on a column in the spreadsheet. Canned Responses is a lab designed to save you more of this precious time. By saving the email text as a canned response, you will spend less time recreating an email. In just a couple of clicks, you can insert your canned response and move on to the next message or item on your to-do list. Here are a few ways Canned Responses might be helpful:
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- Weekly reminders for homework, projects, progress reports, or office hours
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- Parent communication newsletters
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- Commonly asked questions (a teacher FAQ)
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- Custom email signatures for different contacts; current settings allow only one signature
- Save custom email signatures and save templates to send the same information multiple times.
Labs
Experimental features that can break or disappear at any time. Labs are a feature that can be turned on or off by a domain administrator. 30 seconds is the maximum amount of time you can have to undo the sending of an email with the Undo Send lab.
Google Chrome is the most popular and widely-used Internet browser in the world. It’s fast, secure, and works on all operating systems and devices. It’s also extendible. This means third-party developers can integrate the functionality of their applications with Chrome to make it even more powerful. There are two main approaches to remember: extensions and apps (there are also add-ons which work with specific Google tools such as Docs and Sheets, but these are independent of Chrome. We cover add-ons in an upcoming lesson). Both apps and extensions can be found in the Chrome Web Store. You’ll find the shortcut under the App Launcher icon in Chrome (at the top left of the browser, labeled Apps). Extensions work by integrating fully with Chrome and extending the native capabilities of the browser, but limited compared to an app. Apps are web-based versions of software applications that live completely in the cloud; Chrome apps are simply launchers for the web-based software. The Chrome Web Store has apps and extensions available for use. The Education category makes finding education-specific apps and extensions easy for educators.
Curating and selecting educational apps and extensions is the first step when trying to enrich your class and streamline workflows. Extensions like Readability help students to read websites better by removing distractions and giving them annotation tools to highlight and take notes. The VideoNot.es app lets you take notes right alongside a YouTube video. OneTab gathers up all those tabs and saves them in a simple list that you can go back to anytime. Apps like Khan Academy or CK-12 deliver the content itself. Apps generally have more functionality than extensions. Chrome apps and extensions can be force-installed on Chromebooks in your education domain.
G Suite Add-Ons are additional features created by third-party developers who identify needs and address them using the open infrastructure of G Suite. Add-ons are created using a Google App Script, a coding language based on JavaScript syntax. The best add-ons are designed to be easy enough for anyone to use. App Script provides a great opportunity to work on real-world problems and to solve them using G Suite. There are three separate sets of add-ons that are each related to a different core product in the G Suite for Education suite (Docs, Forms, and Sheets). Add-ons make many things possible, including:
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- Mail merge
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- Automatically creating quizzes from documents
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- Automatically grading quizzes using Google Forms
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- Providing individualized feedback to students more easily
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- Creating citations and bibliographies
- Distributing documents and folders to students more quickly