Author: Chris Malanga

I’m Chris Malanga and I’ve been an Educational Technologist with the Northern Buckeye Education Council/NWOCA since 2016. In this role, I help teachers, administrators, and students integrate technology into our schools. My passion is helping people develop skills to change the world of education!

This was a tip that I learned at this year’s ITIP Ohio Google Summit – thanks to Lauren Richardson and Ashley Morrison from Indian Hills.

Have you ever wanted to collaborate with someone when drafting an email? Now you can.. with Google Docs!

This uses the recent Building blocks feature in Google Docs. Building blocks lets you add pre-formatted “snippets” to Google Docs.

To get started, create a new Google Doc, or work with one you’ve already got. Go to Insert > Building blocks and choose Email draft. read more

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In a Tech Tip from 2019, John wrote about the awesome snooze feature in Gmail. This feature allows you to defer email and have it return to your inbox at a later time.

Today’s tip is in a similar vein, but this time it deals with delayed sending of your email.

Scheduled send is the name of the feature and it is built right into Gmail. It’s super easy to use!

Compose a message as usual, but instead of hitting Send, hit the drop-down arrow next to the send button and choose Schedule send.

You will then be prompted to choose a time when the email will be sent. In this case my options are Tomorrow morning, This afternoon and Monday morning. read more

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Currently, Google Calendar has a feature called Appointment Slots. Using this feature, you can set up a block of appointments on your calendar that other people can reserve. For example, you can set aside 2 hours that you’re available to meet with parents in 15-minute slots. Parents can then book one of the 15-minute slots at a time that works best for them.

It’s a great feature, BUT… the one big issue with appointment slots is that a Google Account is needed to use it. This was a limiting factor to it being useful to schools. read more

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I’m a big fan of the puzzle game Wordle. If you haven’t played it (really?!), you have six chances to guess a five letter word. Wordle was developed by a Welsh software engineer named Josh Wardle. He sold his little puzzle game to the New York Times for a seven-figure sum!

Wordle’s success has spawned a ton of copycat games. My new favorite is Factle. Factle is the “unofficial trivia based version of Wordle.” The concept is simple: put facts in order. Whether it’s the highest paid sports figure, the countries with the largest population, or the biggest vegetable exports, it’s been done in Factle.  read more

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Way back in 2018, Kim introduced you to a new Google Sheets feature called checkboxes. And then in 2019, Julianne explained how to use the COUNTIF function to… well… count things. In today’s Tech Tip, I’m going to show you how to combine these two features for a super-handy function that will help with tracking data.

In case you missed Kim and Juli’s tips, they should be linked above.

Here’s a quick review on how to add checkboxes to your Google Sheet: read more

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