Edmonds Digital Learning

There are times when it's very important people know when a document is a draft. One of the best ways to do this is to put the word 'DRAFT' in huge letters in the background as a watermark. This practice is relatively easy in Word. Google Docs? Not so much. But, never fear, there is a way to do it! Our journey begins with these steps: 1. Open your online Google Drive 2. In the top right corner, click the '+ New' button 3. Hover over 'More' and select 'Google Drawings' 4. A Google Drawings document will open. Name it something catchy that makes sense for what you're doing so you won't lose it. I named mine 'Draft Watermark'. 5. Insert a text box by clicking on the text box icon 6. Type the word 'DRAFT' (or whatever...I mean, you could insert an image, if you'd rather). It will be small, but you can highlight the word and change the font and size. I set mine at Ariel - 96. 7. While your word is stil...

Finding old emails in GMail can be a real pain sometimes. Why in the world is this? After all, Google got its start as a search engine! Luckily, a recent update could make things a little easier. Before we get into the new update, there are a few little secrets everyone should know. First of all, the entire 'Search mail' text field is a drop-down menu that can help you filter your searches. Instead of just typing into the field and pressing <Enter> on your keyboard, try these steps: 1. Open GMail 2. On the righthand side of the Search mail text field is a tiny upside-down triangle 3. After clicking the triangle, you'll see a myriad of options to filter your search. Usually by remembering who the email is from and some of the keywords in the text, you'll find it! Okay, now for the second big, fun tip before the new stuff. Don't ever delete your emails, archive them! GMail gives you nearly unlimited storage, so you might as well try to fil...

Ever wonder how much work really got done between a first draft and a final draft? Take the mystery out of that question with one of the newest features from Google Docs. Comparing documents! This useful feature can show all the differences between two documents in the blink of an eye...okay, maybe several eye-blinks, but here's how to do it! 1. Open the final draft of a piece of writing 2. Click on the 'File' menu, hover over 'Version history' and select 'See version history' 3. Looking at the menu to the right, click on the first saved version (you may need to open a dropdown to see all the former versions) 4. When you find the first version, click the three dots to the right of the version's name and then click 'Make a copy' 5. A new document will open with the date and time the first draft was completed in the document title 6. Click the 'Tools' menu and then click 'Compare documents' 7. Click 'My Driv...

Digital is fabulous, but sometimes nothing beats good old-fashioned paper for taking notes. Printing multiple Google Slides to a page with room for taking notes is one great way to do this, but the steps may not be as obvious as you'd think... 1. In the Google Slides presentation you'd like to print, click the 'File' menu 2. Select 'Print settings and preview' 3. By default, Slides will print one slide per page without room for notes, to change this, click '1slide without notes' to open the menu 4. Select the number of slides per page you'd wish to show.  5. By default, the slides will print horizontally, to change this, click 'Landscape' and select 'Portrait' 6. When you're happy with the preview, click 'Print' 7. Finally, click the blue 'Print' button

Have you ever had a long digital text and need folks to navigate to a particular sentence or paragraph quickly? With Google Docs, it's no problem. Just create a bookmark to lead your readers to the exact part of the passage you're looking to highlight. Read on to learn how to do it! 1. Open the Google Doc in which you'd like to add bookmarks 2. Navigate to the sentence or paragraph you'd like folks to find and read quickly 3. Click to place the cursor where you'd like to place the bookmark 4. Click the 'Insert' menu and select 'Bookmark'* 5. A small, blue bookmark will appear in the left-side margin 6. Right-click the word 'Link' and select 'Copy link address' 7. Share this link with folks who need to read the passage 8. When they click it will take them to that exact part of your document! *Wikipedia. 4 February, 2020. Pacific swift.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_swift .

Google Translate is a fabulous tool when you're looking for a way to translate a few words, phrases or sentences, but wouldn't it be nice if it could translate an entire document? You are in luck because...it can! The software will even translate PDFs with readable text. Please note, this process will not work on PDFs that were created by simply scanning a paper document, although there is a workaround, find it at this link . Here's to do it: 1. Navigate to translate.google.com 2. Near the top left of the page, click 'Documents' 3. Click 'Browse your computer'. Notice the many file types that are compatible. 4. Select the document and click 'Open'. It also works to double-click the file. 5. Select the language the document is written in and the language you'd like to translate it to. 6. Click 'Translate' 7. You'll now see the text translated into the language you selected. You can copy and paste the text into ...

It's kind of weird to think about them this way, but every Google Doc is actually a little personal website. Sometimes, it's great to be able to share a Doc with a few other people and other times it's great to share it with hundreds of people. But what if you want everyone to see it with no sharing required? Follow these steps to make your document viewable by anyone, even if they don't have a Google account! 1. Open the Google Doc you'd like to show the world 2. Click on the blue 'Share' button in the top right corner 3. Click the word 'Advanced' (look carefully, it's tiny) 4. Click 'Change...' 5. Select ' On - Public on the web' 6. If you want people to look at the document, just click 'Save'. If you're looking for people to be able to edit the document, click 'Can view' and select 'Can edit'. Please note that selecting this option means that literally, ANYONE who finds your docum...

Ever want to spice up your Google Docs with a little color? Now is your big chance with this three-in-one tech tip! Change the Background Color 1. Open your Google Doc 2. Click on the 'File' menu and select 'Page Setup' 3. Under 'Page color', choose which color you'd like your document to be 4. Click 'OK' 5. Your document will now be the color you selected. If you chose a darker color, your text will probably be hard to read (see below), so you can... Change the Text Color 1. Highlight all of the text in the document you wish to change. If you'd like to change it all, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A 2. Click the 'Text color' icon marked by a capital A 3. Select the color you'd like. Be careful about choosing some colors as they may contrast and be difficult to see. For the dark purple color shown above, white text is a good choice (as shown below). 4. Wait, you want each paragra...

Years ago, while taking a class on children's literature, I read an excellent book called Esperanza Rising   by Pam Muñoz Ryan. After reading the book, the task was to write a paper outlining the benefits of teaching the book to students. I finished the entire paper before I noticed I had misspelled the word 'Esperanza' every time I'd typed it! I painstakingly went through my entire paper looking for every instance where I had typed the word to fix the spelling mistake...if only I had known about using 'Find and Replace'. Using this editing function allows for the option of finding the word each time it appears in a document and then replace it with another word or phrase. Here's how to use it. 1. Open the Google Doc where you need to replace a word 2. Click the 'Edit' menu and select 'Find and replace' 3. In the text field next to 'Find', type the word or phrase you'd like to locate within your document. In t...