You can take it with you! Transfer your Gmail and Drive with Google Takeout for Schools

Change is a part of life:

• Maybe you are a high school senior or a college student and you are graduating.
• Or perhaps you are a student who is moving to a new school.
• You might be a teacher who is taking a job at a new school district.
• Or maybe you are an educator who is retiring after many years of service.

In each situation it is very possible you may have a Google account. G Suite may be used at your high school, your college, and any one of your jobs.

So what happens to your Google account when you graduate high school, graduate college, move from one job to another, and eventually retire? You will have built up years of emails, documents, slideshows, and much more. Is there an easy way to take all those files and all that data with you? What would be great would be a simple tool to copy all of your files to a different Google account (such as your personal Gmail account).

Well thankfully we have that with Google Takeout for Schools. This is a very simple and free tool that will copy the emails and Drive files from your school account over to either a personal Gmail account or another G Suite for Education account. See below for a video demonstrating all the steps, as well as written direction on the process.

Remote Learning & Pear Deck Webinar

I recently had the privilege to provide a webinar for Pear Deck on how to use their tool for remote teaching and learning.

For those not familiar, Pear Deck is an awesome add-on for Google Slides that allows you to add interactive elements to your slideshows.When you run the slideshow through the Pear Deck add-on the students can join the presentation with a code and follow along slide by slide. As they do, the students can respond to interactive questions including multiple choice, text response, numeric response, drawing, and drag and drop. And all of these responses are collected for you as the teacher.

In the 1-hour webinar on "Remote Learning and Pear Deck" I went over the fundamentals of Pear Deck for asynchronous learning, showed how to create a Pear Deck activity in Google Slides, shared best practices, highlighted some favorite features, and answered lots of questions.

If you would like to watch the recorded video, you can access it below. In addition you can find all of my other Pear Deck blog posts, videos, and resources on this site at:
www.controlaltachieve.com/peardeck

See below for the video...

Adding Audio to Pear Deck Google Slides Activities

Pear Deck is an awesome add-on for Google Slides that allows you to add interactive elements to your slideshows.When you run the slideshow through the Pear Deck add-on the students can join the presentation with a code and follow along slide by slide. As they do, the students can respond to interactive questions including multiple choice, text response, numeric response, drawing, and drag and drop. And all of these responses are collected for you as the teacher.

Recently Pear Deck got even better with a new feature that allows you to add recorded or uploaded audio to the activity! This is especially helpful if you are running the Pear Deck activity as a student paced lesson, so the students can hear you speaking to give instructions, read content aloud, provide a personal connection, and more.

To help explain this I have recorded a short 7-minute video that covers all the steps. See below to access that.

If you would like to learn more, I recorded a free 1-hour webinar on "Remote Learning & Pear Deck" where I went over the fundamentals of Pear Deck for asynchronous learning, shared best practices, highlighted favorite features, and answered lots of questions. You can see the recorded video at:
www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/05/peardeck-webinar.html

What's New in Google - April 2020

Catch up on everything new in G Suite for Education from April 2020, and see great ideas and resources!

Below is the recorded video from our April 2020 Google User Meeting, along with the meeting agenda and all the awesome resources and G Suite updates from the summer months. This includes 16 new Google updates and 32 Google resources for your class.

The monthly meetings are hosted by the Google Educator Group of Ohio, but are open to anyone from any location. The purpose of these meetings is to:

• Connect Google-using educators
• Share the latest Google Apps news and features
• Provide tutorials, demonstrations, and how-to’s
• Share best practices of how Google Apps is being used within schools
• Ask questions and get answers

The video from the meeting is recorded and available for later viewing for those who cannot attend or connect live. See below to view the recorded video, agenda, and all the resources from the April 2020 meeting:

Annotate PDF's Together in Google Meet with Kami

When in a Google Meet video conference with a student, a colleague, or any other participant, sometimes you may need to work on a PDF together.

For example, I have heard from teachers wanting to do tele-therapy sessions with a student where the child needs to practice tracing letters or shapes on exiting PDF worksheets.

There are many tools for annotating a PDF, but what would be great would be something that is free, easy to use, and allows for real time collaboration between people. Well thankfully there is an excellent option with Kami.

Kami is a website for PDF annotation found at kamiapp.com. It is a great match for this need for many reasons:

• It can be used on its own or right along side of Google Meet.
• You can sign in with your existing Google account.
• You can upload any PDF you would like to work on.
• You can then send a link to a student, colleague, or other collaborator.
• That person can access the PDF with just the link you sent, and without having to sign into anything.
• You and your participant can then write and draw on the PDF in real time.
• And it is all free!

To help demonstrate all the details of this process, I have recorded a short 5-minute video, which you can view below.