IT Ideas

This is a brief video tutorial on the mail policies that you can configure in Google Apps for Education. You should view this alongside the Google Enterprise Support Guides which go into detail on all of the settings.

I'm a big fan of Lucidcharts and use it a lot for all sorts of charts. However, started playing with Draw.io today and found it a real alternative. Its free, integrates with Drive and seems to work really well. You could use it for all sorts of things, mind maps, organisational charts, network maps and so on. You can export the results as an image file and dump it into other docs with ease. I've added it to the wheatleypark.org domain so you will find it at school if you look in apps - give it a go. Its actually quite good fun just to play with it! Brief demo below:

This is a brief video guide to creating users in Google Apps for Education.

I see quite a lot of posts about how to make stuff work on Chromebooks in schools. So I thought I'd do a video to give some sort of overview. You should view this alongside the Google guides, that can be found at  https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/1289189  - these are good - but take some going through. Any questions feel free to ask.....

I've been asked a lot over the last few weeks about managing and deploying Chrome in school - especially those thinking of moving to Google Apps for Education. So if that's you, this might be useful. Its aimed at whoever manages the network as it assumes knowledge of Group Policy, Network Shares and Active Directory. But you can always point the right person towards this.

OK - something I learnt at the Google Teacher Academy this week (think everyone else knew it!). You can create short urls for sites and google documents very easily - just go to  http://goo.gl/ Copy the url of you doc or whatever in and hit shorten url - thats it!

While I like tools such as LucidCharts and MindMup for making diagrams, both of these tools require users to do something before they can use them - agree to permissions etc. There is also a bit of a learning curve involved. This is where Drawings come in. Google Drawings is the least used of the Google tools that is there by default in Google Drive - at least in out school domain. Not because its not useful - in fact I think it is one of the best tools, but because people don't really understand what you do with it and how it links to the other apps. So I have a mini campaign to get people drawing at the moment. Here are a couple of my doodles - one serious and one no so much: There are lots of really good YouTube videos about using Drawings - you can look up as well.