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.

3 Ways Google Drive and MS Office Can Live Together in Harmony

- Coke versus Pepsi
- Star Wars versus Star Trek
- Google Drive versus Microsoft Office
These are the timeless struggles of humanity.

So you are using Google Drive and its productivity tools such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides. But you still have Microsoft Office files from years and years before. What can you do with all of those existing Office files? Is there any way for your Microsoft files and your Google Drive to live in harmony?

Although Microsoft Office and Google Drive can often be thought of as competing products, they actually can work together in many ways. Google allows you to store all of your Office files in Drive, and then once they are there you can use them in three main ways:

• You can convert your MS Office files into Google format
• You can leave the files in MS Office format and then do light editing with a helpful extension
• You can leave the files in MS Office format, but then open and edit them locally in Office with the Drive File Stream tool

In this blog post we will take a look at all three of these options and how they work. You may end up using all three, or find just the one that works best for you and your specific needs. See below for all the details.

7 Helpful Hacks for Google Tools

On the 7th day of Tech-Mas my true love gave to me… 7 Helpful Hacks.

Note: This post is part of my "12 Days of Tech-Mas" series for 2017. You can see all of the posts for each day as they get released in the main post here: "12 Days of Tech-Mas 2017".

Google tools have so many awesome features, options, and settings, that it is easy to miss some of the cool things their products can do for you. In this blog post we are going to take a look at seven helpful hacks to get more out of your Google experience.

The criteria I used for coming up with this list of tips and tricks include:

• These are built-in features in the Google tools, rather than something that needs to be installed separately such as extensions or add-ons.
• These should provide some benefit to you such as saving time, improving organization, avoiding problems, or making you more efficient.
• These tips should be lesser known features of common Google tools.

Certainly you may be familiar with some of these tips, but hopefully you will learn a few new tricks, or at least be reminded and encouraged to use some of these options. As always, I would love to hear your favorite lesser known Google tips. Please share your ideas in the comments at the bottom of the post.

3 Google Updates Announced at Education On Air 2016

Christmas came a little early for attendees of Google’s 2016 Education On Air virtual conference.

As part of the opening keynote presentations, Google added in a short section to reveal several new updates for G Suite for Education (formerly Google Apps for Education). These updates included:

1. New ways for students to log into Chromebooks
2. Parents no longer need Google accounts for Classroom email summaries
3. Graduating students can move email and Drive files to personal accounts

Education On Air is a (somewhat) annual event where educators from around the world offer free professional development sessions as live video presentations through Google Hangouts. I have been fortunate to present at each EduOnAir since the first one. This year my session was on “Fantastic Feedback Tools for Google Doc” which you can find here: EduOnAir link

You can view all of the recorded sessions from this year at:
https://educationonair.withgoogle.com/live/2016-dec/

As for the three new G Suite for Education features, see below for all the details…

The Future of the Google Drive Template Gallery

Templates can be a helpful resource when creating a new document, slideshow, or spreadsheet. They can provide you with a starting point for a resume, report, budget, class presentation, or such.

This can be helpful for young students so they do not have to create an entire project from scratch but can start with the shell you provide and fill in their content. This can also be useful for older students to simply save time when completing a lab report or creating a tri-fold brochure.

For many years Google has provided templates for Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drawings. Recently though, Google has been maintaining two different template galleries: the old template gallery and the new template gallery, each with their own unique features.

Many of us have been wondering about the future of the template galleries. Would the old gallery be retired? If so, what would happen to all the old public templates? And what about the templates we loaded specifically for our domains?

Recently Google sent out an email to domain admins with information that helps to shed some light on what’s to come for the template galleries. See below for details.

Sharing and Collaborating with Google Drive

One of the most powerful features of Google Apps is the ability for users to share and collaborate on documents, slideshows, spreadsheets, and more.

This transforms what can happen in schools and provides many benefits:

• Everyone can work on the same document (no multiple versions or different media)
• You can work with colleagues on projects (grants, lessons plans, newsletters, common assessments)
• Students can do group work easily in the same document or slideshow
• Student work can be turned in and graded electronically
• Users can get and give feedback on documents
• You can work anywhere, anytime, on any device
• And of course, it helps save on paper and printing

If you are new to Google Apps, or have staff who are just now moving into Google Drive, or students who are learning about collaboration for the first time, it is critical that you get a solid foundation on how sharing and collaborating works in the Google ecosystem. So many other things you will do with Google Apps will be impacted and improved by collaboration.

A while back a recorded a one-hour webinar covering all of the details of sharing and collaborating with Google Drive. See below for the recorded video, a help guide, and a slideshow.

Drive-ing me Crazy

Normally my posts are about all the wonderful ways Google tools can be used to transform teaching and learning. Unfortunately this post is not one of those.

Many people have been emailing me saying that they are not able to access my publicly shared help guides, slideshows, and other Google resources. It turns out something has gone terribly wrong with my Google Drive.

If you are unable to access my resources as well, I wanted to take a moment here to try to explain what is happening…