Whether it's time for fun things like playing outside with our kids, time for the gym, or time to Netflix and chill, we all want a little more time in our day. We can't get more time, but we can use our time efficiently. One way to do that is to zip through email with the help of smart replies and canned responses in Gmail (G Suite for Edu email).
Smart Replies are those automated suggestions that appear when you're writing a response in to message in Gmail. Canned Responses are slightly different. Canned Responses are messages that you compose and then save to re-use whenever you want. Watch my new video to learn how you can create and use Canned Responses in Gmail.
This morning I showed one of my favorite time-saving tricks to a great group of adult education teachers. The "trick" is to save time when adding comments to students' Google Docs. You can do this with canned comments in Google Classroom and there are some Google Docs Add-ons that do similar things. The most straight-forward method is to write your frequently used comments as notes in Google Keep and then just copy and paste them into comments in Google Docs through the use of the side panel in Google Docs. Watch my video to learn how to save time when adding comments to students' Google Documents.
You might be wondering why I didn't just use the canned comments option in Google Classroom. The reason is that the teachers I was working with this morning didn't have access to Google Classroom.
This morning I led a small workshop about creative uses for Google Forms and Google Slides. As often happens during those workshops someone asked me what my favorite Forms add-ons are. In no particular order, here are my five favorite Google Forms add-ons.
Certify'em Certify'em is a Google Forms Add-on that makes it possible for you to issue automatically issue certificates to people who successfully complete your Google Form. When you enable Certify'em on a Form it will populate a couple of required fields in your Form and ask you to specify a minimum passing score. Complete those fields then write your quiz and set an answer key just as you would for any other quiz that you build in Google Forms. When students complete the quiz they will automatically receive PDF certificates in their email inboxes if they have passed the quiz. (If you want to use Certify'em to issue certificates without making people complete a quiz, just set one easy question as the only scored question).
Form Limiter Form Limiter is an Add-on that lets you automatically stop accepting responses at a specified time or when you have reached a specified maximum number of responses. This Add-on is excellent when you need to cap the responses you need for a volunteer activity. Obviously, it's also good for imposing a time limit on your students to complete an assessment in Google Forms.
Form Recycler formRecycler is a free Google Forms Add-on that makes it easy to reuse questions from one Google Form into another form. When you have the formRecycler Add-on installed you can access all of your existing Google Forms and then pick questions from one of those existing Forms to use in a new form. You can use formRecycler multiple times on the same form and thereby include questions from multiple existing forms in your new form.
CheckItOut CheckItOut is a Google Forms Add-on that makes it easy to keep track of the things that you let kids borrow from your classroom. To use CheckItOut you create a Google Form with a drop-down question that lists all of the items you want students to be able to borrow. CheckItOut will automatically create a second question in which students can check in the items that they borrowed. Watch my video to see how it works.
Choice Eliminator Choice Eliminator is a Google Forms Add-on that lets you create a Form on which choices disappear after they have been used. For example, if I create a Google Form that has ten meeting times listed on it, once a meeting time has been selected it will disappear from the options available to subsequent visitors. Using Choice Eliminator is a good option for teachers who have personal Google Accounts, but don't have G Suite for Education accounts. Watch the following video to learn how to use Choice Eliminator.
