"G Suite Hacks" Continued.

I've had a lot of fun working with teachers doing some virtual trainings lately. During one of these another trainer said the thing that I always notice. That often it's the little trick you mentioned in passing that people leave the session buzzing about. It's so true! But also so fun.

So today I'm coming at you with 3 more of my favorite Google tricks. These are a few simple things you may not have know before, but will blow your mind! Check out the first 5 here.

Google Slides - Q&A

In my first decade of teaching, there was a LOT of chatter about backchannels. Today's Meet was the darling app of educational conferences. A "back channel" let participants in live sessions or keynotes talk amongst themselves through text. We also do this with twitter chats.

And of course, today, in the time of online and hybrid learning and working, virtual meeting tools like Zoom have a chat window built in to the platform.

This idea came into the classroom as a way to let students engage with one another and the teacher during live classes. Students could ask questions or make comments during class. I'm a fan of this idea. I like to be able to give students a way to engage that doesn't necessarily require me to stop class every five minutes or ask students to put their hand down and remember who had a comment.

Google Slides offers this feature built right in. As a presenter you can display or share the link for your presentation and attendees can type in comments or questions that you can see as the presenter. A nifty little feature!

Check out how!

Dual Profiles in Chrome

This is an incredibly useful feature if you are using one computer for professional and personal use. It just makes life so much easier for you and your students.

Set up two different profiles on Google Chrome, one for each account, and you can open up different windows with each account. This means no more trying to access a document with the wrong account or logging yourself out of an account in another tab. It keeps everything separate and keeps you more organized.

Shakeup Learning will show you how to do it!

Incognito Mode

If you don't know about incognito mode, it's the ability to open an new Google Chrome window that is not attached to your account. It will hide your browser history. While this many bring to mind nefarious intentions (and students do sometimes use it this way so it's good to know it exists!) this feature has a dozen little uses that are incredibly helpful. A few of my faves:

• Log in with a different account. If I am on my student's computer and need to check something on my own account. I can do that in an incognito window.

• Check share privileges. Need to see if your links are visible without logging in to a Google account? You can check on incognito mode.

• Use incognito mode to login on a shared computer. This will let you login to your accounts without needing to logout and scrub your info. If you exit out of the window your info is gone!

Take a look at the Google Support Center to see how to use this feature.