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Showing posts from June, 2019

GMail: Vacation Responder

Ahh...summer! Time for kicking it on the beach, camping trips, backyard cookouts, and checking tons of email. Wait, what??? Are you taking a vacation this summer and need to unplug from email for a few days/weeks? Consider turning on the Vacation responder in GMail. This handy feature will alert senders that you won't be responding to email messages while you're away. Here's how to turn it on: 1. Open GMail. 2. Near the top right, look for a small gear-shaped icon and click it. 3. Select 'Settings' 4. Scroll down until you find 'Vacation responder'. It will be at the very bottom of the page. 5. Click the button to turn the vacation responder on, enter the first day and last day of your vacation, choose a subject line and write a quick message. 6. Be sure to keep your message short, to-the-point, and professional. 7. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click 'Save Changes'. GMail does not save automatically, so this button

Google Docs: Add Numbers and Prefixes to Lists

In 1958, R&B/rock and roll band, The Coasters, released one of their most famous tunes, Yakety Yak . The lyrics in the song lay out a list of chores a teenager is expected to do before being allowed to rock and roll and, subsequently, take a ride. If only the hip father featured in the song knew about adding prefixes to numbered lists in Google Docs, he could have shared the list with his son and spared himself all that backtalk. If you need to create a step-by-step list, here's how to do it with very little yakety yak: 1. Type your list in a Google Doc. 2. Highlight the entire list. 3. Click the 'Numbered list' button. 4. Right-click one of the numbers in the list (it doesn't matter which one) and select 'Edit prefix and suffix...' 5. Type a prefix, such as 'Step'. Be sure to put a space after the last letter so the word and number are not squished together. Check 'Apply to entire list' and then click 'OK'.

Google: Flip a coin, roll a die, spin a spinner

Several years ago, I taught a student who needed to roll dice as part of an incentive program designed by my school's behavior specialist. We were discussing different apps or programs he could use to roll digital dice before we thought, "Wait a minute, why don't we just give him actual dice?" Turns out, actual physical dice worked great, but what if they didn't? Google would have had us covered! Google will flip a coin, roll a die, or provide a game spinner in case you are plumb out of the real thing. To flip a coin... 1. Go to google.com 2. Search 'flip a coin' 3. That's it! To roll a die... 1. Go to google.com 2. Search 'roll a die' 3. That's it! To use a game spinner... 1. Go to google.com 2. Search 'spinner' 3. This will bring up a fidget spinner, ugh... 4. But, wait, there's a toggle switch just above the fidget spinner that changes it to a number spinner! 5. The default is to have numbers 1-6,