IT Ideas

How to re-size Videos in Google Sites Lots of people at school are building Google Sites. Its really easy to add YouTube videos and videos from your Google Drive. However, re-sizing them is a little tricky. Here is one way of doing it. Step 1 Select 'Insert' then 'More Gadgets'. Add Gadget by URL. Paste in:  http://mori79.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/iframe-wrapper.xml Step 2 Add the sharing link for the YouTube video - see bit highlighted as e.g: Paste this into the Document box in the Gadget: You can now select the exact size you want with the height and width options. Step 3 Select OK - your video will be in your site at the size you want. Longer than simple insert - but you do get the size you want.

Google+ Lands at Last for Education Users Logged into my management console today and there was the link to enable Google+. I've enabled this for staff quietly for now - just to have a play around. Student have to be at least 13 - so thats going to be Y9+. Some education about how to use it for education rather than just fun is going to be needed. But the potential for virtual classroom (via Hangouts) and groups learning via Circles seem great. Could have some highly creative and collaborative online work.

Sparklines - create trend lines in cells The sparkline functin in Google Spreadsheets allows you to plot trendlines in individual cells. Basic function: =sparkline(cell range) - see below for e.g You can also do the coloured bar charts using the additional parameters: =sparkline( E30:I30 ,{"charttype","bar"}) This make the blue and orange bar chart in a cell.

Data Validation and Cell Protection Google Sheets  This is a brief video on how to do the following: Cell validation - limit what a user can add to a cell - say a range of grades.  Protect sheets.  Protect ranges and cells.  Any questions - please ask.

Play audio straight from your Google Drive. Just found this one. If you go to Create in your Google Drive and then More, Get More Apps - look for an app called Drivetunes. This adds Drivetunes to your Google Drive and allows you to play common audio files formats straight from your drive. No need to download. Now I just have to upload all my music so I can play it on my Chromebook.....

How to link Spreadsheets Few people have asked me how to link spreadsheets. Say someone has a spreadsheet you take data from. They update their sheet and you have to then update your one. You can link the two dynamically using the importrange function. So for example: =ImportRange("0AkvcQ- UNCMvIdDF5ZDhOYVlXb0drcW1zNTMy RjNvVkE","sheet1!A5") The first bit in quotes is the "id" of the source spreadsheet. You can copy and paste this from the spreadsheets url. The second bit in quotes is the name of the sheet in the spreadsheet you want to take data from and the data you want. So sheetname followed by ! then the cell or cell range e.g A1 or A1:A100 - all in quotes as the example above. This will pull in data from the source sheet. Change stuff on the source sheet and this will update. If you are doing this more than once in a sheet it is a good idea to put the sheet id in a cell - say A1. The the formula becomes: =ImportRange(A1 ,"sheet1!