A Beginner’s Guide to Google Apps for Education

At a recent parent forum, we had requests for a workshop on Google Apps, so parents can understand what their child is doing at school and support them at home. We focused on Google Docs, Google Drive and GMail. You can see a summary of what we spoke about in the presentation below. We used the…

Leaving Well with Google – updated!

[Editor note: We have updated this very important post from our previous 2013 version! The information below is current as of 6 May 2016.] This is always a difficult time of year as we say “see ya later” to colleagues, students and families who are leaving our school. To make the transition a little easier,…

Digital Bytes – 15th February, 2016

9 Great Tips for Safari on Your iPad Whether it is your own iPad or the iPads that your students are using, everyone can find some useful tips in this article for using Safari. Some of my favourites are being able to find words on a page easily, quickly viewing recent pages and requesting the…

Learning to Manage Distractions

One of parents’ biggest concerns around student use of technology is that of distractions. The same tool we use to create and learn, can be used to entertain and derail productivity. So what are our options, as teachers? As parents? We could create elaborate structures of control (blocking certain websites, turning off wifi etc), but that…

Email, Spam, YouTube Subscriptions and Snopes

One of the many wonderful things about having Google Apps at our school is that our students are able to have GMail accounts. This really does enable them to have the functionality we adults enjoy with having an email, with the added bonus of learning to use it in a supportive school environment. It allows…

“Oops! I pressed send.”

I recently came across a couple simple add-ons to Gmail that are easy to put on and really handy when you need them. Undo Send: Remember the last time you had “one of those days”? Remember how on that day you ended up sending an email reply-all by mistake, or sent a copied email without…