Tag: Google Docs

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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Google has recently rolled out the Watermark feature to Google Docs. You can use this feature to put your school’s logo, a fun picture, the words draft or confidential, or anything into the background of your document. 

Open a new Google Doc or even an existing Google Doc. Go to your Insert Menu and select Watermark.

This will bring up the Watermark menu off to the side of your Google Doc.

Click on the option to select your image. You can choose any image from Google Drive, Google Image Search, your Camera, or more. read more

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Wouldn’t it be nice to insert a video into your Google Doc and bypass the whole path to YouTube?  Google has recently made this much easier to do! Now you can insert videos right into your Google Doc and have them play while your students are still inside the document. 

First create your document, use tables, colors, whatever you need. Next copy the YouTube URL to the video. Paste it right into your document, and click on the tab key as prompted. This will make it look like a video link, instead of just the ugly link. (If you don’t click the tab key, it will still insert a link to the video, however the option of playing the video inside the document will not work.) read more

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If you’ve never used suggesting mode in Google Docs, it is a really useful tool. Docs has three modes – Editing, Suggesting and Viewing. You can change to any of the modes by clicking on the pencil icon in the toolbar.

Editing mode is the standard mode that you’ll use when creating a document. It allows you to type and make all changes to a document. It’s the normal “word processing” view. In Suggesting mode, any changes become suggestions that can be either accepted or rejected. Viewing mode puts your document into a “reading” mode to show you what it will look like when printed. read more

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Earlier in the summer we heard from Google that they were planning on adding a citation tool to Google Docs. Now those of us who have been using it for a while remember the Research tool which let you add citations to documents with footnotes. Google replaced the feature in 2016 with the Explore tool which includes the ability to add citations as well as pictures to items referenced in the document that were sourced online.

Fast forward to October 2020 and by now most of you will have a brand new citation tool available to you in Google Docs. This tool is much more robust and for all you language arts teachers, yes you can now use it to create proper bibliographies and not just footnote references. read more

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