A few months ago, I was asked to present at the Google Fest being held at Southeast Missouri State University next week. I have been using Google Sites for years, so I was eager to volunteer to do that one (and it's an application not as many are familiar with).
However, recently (just this month), Google announced a HUGE upgrade coming for Sites! I don't have access to it (early adopters are only Super Administrators for schools or Google for Work and I'm not one of those fancy peeps), but let me tell you. It. Looks. Awesome. Drag and drop. Responsive layouts. Don't take my word for it. Check out this video:
Yeah, I am psyched! Of course, I have to give a session using the old Google Sites next week, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's still pretty easy to use.
And, as my mastery project for my Google Chrome Classroom certification, I created a 6-part tutorial on the current Google Sites, showing how to create a student portfolio using the application. You can log in with your Google account to access if you'd like to take a peek! It's self-paced and includes "test yourself" questions along the way. Sophia is pretty cool if you've never used it.
Are you having as much fun learning this summer as I am!? :)
Today, I went to Support Services and picked up the new Chromebooks that our faculty have been given for the next school year. There's "talk" that we might go 1-to-1 eventually with student devices, and I suppose the first step would be to get teachers familiar with the devices first. That's a good plan.
Our devices are HP Chromebook 11 G4, according to the box. Here's a short YouTube video that shows what they gave us. Apparently, it's a pretty inexpensive device ($199). Mine had about 9 GB of free storage (the specs say 16 GB, but I guess that OS must be hefty as I saw 8.9 GB free when I saved my first photo to the device).
They do start up quickly. That's pretty nice. As a computer teacher in a lab with very nice HP computers, super huge monitors, and a mouse, there's some getting used to. We haven't had any training on Chromebooks as we were told we didn't need it because they were so easy, but I did feel compelled to do some internet searching to feel a little more in the know (for the record, I would at least offer a training because a one or two hour getting to know you for people would actually be nice even if just for peace of mind).
First, our devices have USB ports and an SD card reader. So, that's nice. I imagine you can hook up a mouse if you really want one. I haven't tried yet.
Second, it's not a touch screen. I don't know why I expected it to be, but it is not.
Third, we weren't really told how to get it going.... but I figured I'd have to be on the school network to officially sign in (maybe you don't have to be, though, but it did automatically connect here at school). The biggest concern I have for most users is how well this works OFF the internet. I know, I know. It's made for cloud computing and "everywhere" has wi-fi (that's a lie... ask my daughter who went over on her data and can only check SnapChat on wi-fi until her plan resets). But, if I am in my car or a waiting room (or, a kid on a school bus), can I at least type a document? That's important. So, to test, I disabled the network, clicked Google Docs, and... oh, I got an error.
So, I did my research. Here's what it told me. A few things to note about using Drive offline.
Drive will only work offline in a Chrome browser window.
You can use Drive offline on multiple computers, but you need to enable it on each computer individually.
If you share computers with another person, you may not want to sync to that computer as it could give both people access to the files.
If you are using Google Drive within a Google Apps for Education domain, your domain administrator will have to enable the option for users to use Google Drive offline.
Next, I reconnected to the internet, went into Google Drive, clicked the Gear and went to Settings. It had an Offline button that was not clicked, so I clicked it and a Google Docs Offline extension was added to Chrome.
I disconnected again, clicked Google Docs and yay! It allowed me to see files and create a new file. What I don't know is if I have to keep this window open until I have Wi-Fi again to be able to update it or if I can close it. So, I like to live dangerously. It's closed. Crossing my fingers.
I opened Drive up on my actual computer. Nothing. I refreshed. Nothing. I opened Google Drive on the device. Nothing. I searched for the file. It was there. I double clicked it and it opened and I guess THEN it finally synced. My desktop computer finally saw it. So, you do have to open the document for it to sync. Lesson learned.
Other random things... I didn't know how to "right click" since I had no mouse. I learned it's hold Alt while clicking OR use two fingers on the touch pad. Pretty sure I wouldn't have guessed that. I think it was in some card in the box that I didn't really read very carefully. Additionally, when you save something it goes to the Downloads folder. To get to that, you go to Files from the Launcher. I didn't know what it would be called and had to figure that one out, too.
But, that's my first impression! I figured I'd share in case others were just unboxing and had similar questions. For those of you who use Chromebooks and have been for awhile, give me your tips. I love to learn! :)
