Emailing Groups of Students and Parents through eSD

It's about communication.  Feedback, parental involvement and teacher clarity are all proven influencers on student achievement (Hattie).  One way we can foster those influencers is through communication. 

eSD has an email feature that will allow us as teachers to email:

• an entire class
• a small group of students and parents
• indivdual students or parents

with information to encourage, redirect or focus families on what we have going on in our classrooms.  We certainly found this communication to be essential in the spring with remote learning, and can continue that practice here in 20-21. 

Follow the infographic below to see where to find the Email Students & Parents feature in your Teacher Connect gradebook. 

If you have tried this in the past without success, watch the video that follows the infographic. 

It will show you how to set up a windows device to have gmail.com as your default handler/application. 

Having trouble getting gmail to open after following the above steps?  

Follow this tutorial for a 1-time setup on your Surface, Windows laptop or desktop. 

https://www.loom.com/share/079ad0a5611f46938339cc70719de865?sid=3447c119-a050-4553-aba6-ed8d7c69b1b4

Remember - we are happy to help, via email, virutally or in person!

jtamburlin@smasd.org  jtamburlin.youcanbook.me

Saving Webpages/Emails to Google Drive

Have you ever been searching the Internet and wanted to save information from a webpage?  Here is a quick way to save the information to your Google Drive.

1.     Make sure you are using Google Chrome to search the Internet
2.    When you are on a page you want to save, go to File - Print
3.    Change the Destination to Save to Google Drive
4.    Then click the blue Save button -- **Don't forget this step**
5.    The saved information can be found in your Drive as a .pdf file
6.    This also works in your Gmail.  -- Just click on an email and choose print, then you can choose Save to Google Drive

**Don't forget to organize all your new saved files**

In your Google drive, click on the blue New button and choose Folder

Name the folder

The folder will appear in your Drive

Drag and drop your saved files to the new folder(s)

Everyone Loves a Shortcut!

Last month, the blog featured some great tips for using the Chrome browser. This week's post will focus on some specific tips and shortcuts you can use with Gmail and Google Docs and stems from a personal experience from last week! 

I had just finished typing a school-wide email and, as I was proofreading it, found an error I needed to fix. I have no idea what I hit, but my entire text of my email disappeared. Of course it was saving my draft as I was typing, but what was saved was now a nice, blank email. I was super frustrated and couldn't even remember exactly what I had typed to try to redo it. Unlike typing in Google Docs, there was no "undo" button in my compose email window, however, I found a keyboard shortcut to undo my last action, which brought back my email text!

Gmail:
  
We have a toolbar in our compose window that has a lot of features most people use, like changing the font or adding a bulleted list. There are additional keyboard shortcuts that can be accessed by turning them on in the settings menu.

To turn on Gmail's keyboard shortcuts in your account:

1. Click the Settings gear icon (⚙) near your Gmail's top right corner.
2. Select Settings from the menu that appears.
3. Go to the General tab.
4. Make sure Keyboard shortcuts on is selected under Keyboard shortcuts:.
5. Click Save Changes (if you did make any).

To see the entire list of shortcuts available, when you have Gmail open, hold SHIFT and press ?. 

I did find that I was able to undo my last action and recover the text I had typed in the email I referenced above by pressing CTRL and z. I did not have keyboard shortcuts enabled in my settings menu and this still worked, just FYI.

Google Docs:

There are also a lot of menu options in Google Docs. If you need to search these menus for a particular feature, you can use the ALT and z shortcut to pull up the search bar.

Here are a few commonly used shortcuts (similar to what you may have used in other word processing programs):

Copy- CTRL and c
Cut- CTRL and x
Paste- CTRL and v
Undo- CTRL and z
Print- CTRL and p

To pull up the entire list of shortcuts in Google Docs, press CTRL and /.  Note: You can also press CTRL and / while you are in Google Drive to see the full list of shortcuts that work with Google Drive!

Are there any shortcuts that you use often or would like to see? Let us know in the comments below!

Gmail Resources

With all of our email changes this week, there's no new blog post. However, we thought it would be a good idea to have all of the Gmail resources we've created so far in one place. Below you'll find links that will be great references if you get stuck or if you have questions about the new email changes. 

Link to Slideshow: https://goo.gl/H3PLZM

Link to 10 min- Video (Slideshow with narration): https://goo.gl/5cTn5J 

Link to printable tips: https://goo.gl/Uhac0X

Thanks for bearing with us through the change!