Edmonds Digital Learning

Need to have your audience read along with your live presentation? Turn on closed captions in Google Slides! Here are the steps: 1. Open your Google Slides presentation. 2. Click the 'Present' button to start the presentation. 3. Hover the cursor near the bottom of the screen to view the presentation menu and click 'CC Captions'. 5. Your spoken words will display at the bottom of the screen!

In 'Mission: Impossible', Ethan Hunt's top-secret messages self-destruct in five seconds. He's got just enough time to get away before they cause injury, but the practice ensures these messages will never end up in the wrong hands. G-Suite products such as Docs, Slides, and Sheets allow for fantastic collaboration, but collaborators may not need to have access forever. To solve this problem, you can set an expiration date on document sharing and, unlike Ethan, you don't have to worry about an explosion! Here's how to do it: 1. Open the document you'd like to share. 2. Near the top right corner, click the 'Share' button. 3. Enter the name or email address of the person you'd like to share the document with, select whether they are able to edit, comment, or view the document, and then click 'Send'. 4. Click the 'Share' button again and then click 'Advanced'. 5....

The Read&Write extension for Google Chrome is extremely beneficial for many students. It has exceptional features , but the newest one I've found is a little bit hidden within the program.  Here's how students can hear the program read individual words or sentences as they type. 1. Open a Google Doc . 2. Open the Read&Write menu by clicking the small purple puzzle icon. 3. Click the three-dot menu toward the righthand side of the Read&Write menu and select 'Options'. 4. To have text read after each word, check the box next to 'Speak on each word'. To have text read after each sentence, check the box next to 'Speak on each sentence'. Click 'OK'. 5. Please note: The program will read each word after the word is typed and the space bar is pressed. It will read sentences after the punctuation mark is typed. It will not read single words that are followed by punctuation and it wi...

Google Forms is a fantastic and versatile software for quick data collection. It is relatively easy to use, free, and collaborative. What's not to love? Like an onion, a parfait, or young-adult vampire literature, Forms has a lot of layers. The more you peel, spoon, or leaf through, the better experience you'll have. Plus, Forms usually won't make you cry. That's right, I'm looking at you, onion. Here are six tips for getting the most out of Forms.  Use FormRecycler to Reuse Items Remember the Google Form survey you wrote last month? It sure had some great questions! If only there were a way to reuse some of them on your new survey without retyping or copying and pasting line-by-line. Enter the Add-on 'FormRecycler'. This nifty add-on lets you import items from any of your previous Google Forms with no typing required! 1. Go to forms.google.com  and create a new form. 2. Click the three-dot menu in the top right corner and se...

How many slideshows Or documents Have you seen With bullet points That look like this? What if we could jazz it up? Let's say...turn those bullet points into a rainbow or a unicorn, wouldn't that be more fun? Yes. It. Would. Here's how:  1. Open your slideshow and click a slide that has a list marked with bullet points. 2. Right-click one of the bullet points. 3. Select 'More bullets...' 4. Search for something fun, like 'unicorn'. 5. Click the icon that appears (like the unicorn above) and your bullet points will be replaced with cute little unicorns! 6. Alternatively, after your right-click and select 'More bullets...', you can draw what you're looking for in the 'Draw a symbol here' box and Google's draw recognition software will find matches for you. 7. TA-DA!!!

The time of day/week/month that communication is sent matters. Don't believe me? Just ask Juliet Capulet who conspired with Friar Lawrence to fake her death with the assumption that Friar John would deliver a letter, explaining the whole thing, to Romeo Montague who was kicking it up in Mantua. Unfortunately for our young heroes, Friar John got himself locked up in quarantine, the letter never made it and all was lost. Bummer. If you ask me, Juliet should have used GMail to write an email with a scheduled send to ensure her beloved boo would get the message. Or, she could have just texted him, but you know  Lady Capulet was monitoring those. Here's how she should have done it: 1. Go to gmail.com to open your email. 2. Click the '+ Compose' button near the top left corner. 3. Type the email address of the person or persons to whom you'd like to receive the message, type a subject line, and your message. 4. Instead of clicking 'Send', ...