How to Create Contact Groups in Gmail

Yesterday I shared the time-saving tip of scheduling emails in Gmail. Today, I have another time-saving Gmail tip. Creating a contact group or a contact label in Gmail makes it possible to simply type the name of a group into the Gmail composition editor and have all of the addresses in that group populated at once. This can be a huge time-saver when you need to send the same message to a group of students and or their parents.

The process of creating a contact group in Gmail has changed since the last time I published a tutorial about it. The video that I created today outlines the current process for making contact groups in Gmail.

How to Create Annotated Screen Capture Images

This morning I got an email from a reader who was looking for a screen capture tool that included tools for drawing straight lines, arrows, boxes, and generally making screen captures look a little more professional. One of the tools that I recommended was Nimbus Screenshot.

Nimbus Screenshot is available to use as an extension in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. There is also a Nimbus Screenshot Chrome app for Chromebook users who want to be able to capture more than just a browser window. In the following video I demonstrate how to use Nimbus Screenshot to create annotated screen capture images.


Applications for Education
When explaining to students how to use a new tool it's often easier to show with them with a screen capture than it is to write out an explanation. Over the next couple of weeks my high school computer science courses will be online so I'm sure that I'll be making lots of screen captures to highlight pieces of code that need to be altered.

Free Historical Coloring Pages

If you're looking for an offline activity that you can recommend to parents for their students to do at home, take a look at the New York Academy of Medicine's Color Our Collections website. The site contains contributions from more than one hundred museums and libraries around the world. The participating museums and libraries offered of up PDFs of black and white drawings that visitors can print and then color. In other words, Color Our Collections is a huge collection of historical coloring book pages.

Applications for Education
Color Our Collections offers coloring pages covering a wide range of topics and themes. The Getty contributions feature animals, the contribution from the Library of Virginia covers the topic of Women's Suffrage, and Brunel University's collection features trains. Contributions from some museums and libraries cover topics in medicine. Because of the wide range of topics in the collection I'd recommend either curating a collection from the collection to send home or advising parents to pick and print from the website rather than sending students directly to the website.