Three Google Docs Features New Users Often Ask About

If your school is making the switch to G Suite for Education this year, you probably have a question or two about how Google Docs works. In the short video that is embedded below I cover three features that new Google Docs users often ask me about.

Reminder - Searching is a Thinking Skill

Have you ever had a conversation with a student that went like this?

Student: “Mr. Byrne, Google has nothing on my topic.”

Mr. Byrne: “What is your topic?”

Student: “The Civil War.”

Mr. Byrne: “Are you sure that Google has nothing about the Civil War?”

Student: “Well I looked at a bunch of links, but they didn’t say anything about what I was looking for.”

If you have had a conversation like the one above then you have experienced one of the flaws of the digital native concept. Yes, most students today do know how to navigate to Google.com and enter a search term. But that just proves that they can remember a web address and use a keyboard. Increasingly, due to the proliferation of voice commands on mobile phones, it doesn’t even mean that they can use keyboards. Typing or speaking a query into a search engine isn’t difficult. Knowing which terms to type, which type of resources to search for, and how to discern the good from the bad are the skills that search requires.

Those of us who grew up without ubiquitous access to the Internet remember searching through libraries to find one good book on the topic we were researching. Then diving into the bibliography to hopefully find more resources that we could track down through an interlibrary loan or by making phone calls and driving to libraries far away to find a good reference. The process was long in part because of the time it took to locate resources. And it was long due to the fact that when we did find good resources, we pored over them to squeeze everything we could from them. Whether we knew it or not, the length of the process was good for us as it provided more time for thinking, asking more questions, and analyzing what we did know. Unfortunately, all three of those things are often shortcutted by students when they rely on just typing things into Google.

Researching is a thinking skill. It requires that the student first state what it is he or she is trying to determine. Without a clear purpose for the research, students will simply click around the web hoping to find “something useful.” That’s why years ago I developed a pre-search checklist for students to complete before embarking on a research project. A copy of that pre-search checklist is available for free at http://bit.ly/presearch17.

Note: This was an excerpt from the draft of a book that I am writing. 

Email Etiquette Reminders for Students

The start of the new school year is a great time to review email etiquette with students. Doing some basic things like adding a proper opening and using spell check can improve the emails that students send and improve how you feel when you're responding to a students' emails.

Emailing Your Teacher, With Captain Communicator is one of my favorite videos about email etiquette. The short video features two students demonstrating how to write an email to a teacher. It's cute and well worth 90 seconds of your time.


The following video was made by a teacher for the purpose of sharing email etiquette tips with students. It's a bit more serious that the Captain Communicator video.

Why Do Dogs Tilt Their Heads? Why Do They Pant?

My old dog Morrison used to tilt is head to his right whenever I would ask him if he wanted to play stick. He wasn't the only dog to do this. Perhaps you or one of your students have a dog that does the same. If you've ever wondered why dogs tilt their heads in response to a question or other prompt, SciShow has some answers for you in the video embedded below.


Why dogs pant is another question your dog-owning students may wonder about. SciShow Kids has that answered in the following video released last week.


Try one of these seven tools to make a flipped lesson from these dog videos. 

Mega Report Writer - Streamline Narrative Report Writing

Mega Report Writer is a free tool designed by a teacher for the purpose of helping other teachers more efficiently write narrative reports. To get started with Mega Report Writer you import a class roster from either an Excel sheet or from Google Classroom. Once your roster is imported you can start writing comments and phrases that you frequently use in your narrative reports. You can then inset those saved comments and phrases into each report that you write. Mega Report Writer can automatically select gender-specific pronouns for each report that you write.

Applications for Education
Mega Report Writer could help you save time when you write narrative reports about your students. It's not a perfect tool because you do have to copy and paste your report into a Word or Google Doc in order to print it. That said, I can still see myself using it to save time when writing reports.