IT Ideas

Draftback allows you to playback the revisions of a Google Document. It also allows you to analysis when a document was edited, who edited it and for how long. Useful for looking in detail at how a student has created a piece of work over a period of time. Get the extension here . Demo on one of my docs:

In this guide, I'll look at how to automatically provision all your Google Classrooms for your school based on data held in SIMS (the most common UK MIS). To carry out the following you need to be a super admin on your Google Apps domain. The end result will be the creation of a Google Classroom for each class in the school, pre-populated with a lead teacher and students. Step 1 - Create a SIMS report to pull off all students and the classes they take. You will need a report that contains the student forename, surname, Google Apps email and all the classes they take. So a pre-requisite is to have all your Google usernames on SIMS. The fields I use are shown below: Upload the resulting spreadsheet and convert to a Google Sheet.  Step 2 - Create a SIMS report to pull off all teachers and the classes they teach. You will need a report that contains work email, full name, class name and subject of the class. See my report below: In excel - use the 'remove duplicate...

New YouTube controls have recently been added to the Google Apps Admin console. Below is a brief video guide on how to use them and what they look like in practice.

Workspace is a new feature of Teacher Dashboard that has been released into public beta in the last few days. I've just loaded most of our classes and students into Teacher Dashboard for the coming academic year and have spent a little time seeing what it can do. It essentially bring in the assignment setting of Google Classroom into Teacher Dashboard and the ability to build courses which you can use year after year. Demo video below: If you have access to it, there is a feedback bar on each page to put in suggestions. A few observations so far: I've noticed that from the students point of view it creates a folder called 'Workspace' and in that a folder for each Workspace the student becomes a member of. Now as Teacher Dashboard creates a subject folder for each subject, then I'd like the Workspace folders to appear in the associated subject folders. Would make the integration with Teacher Dashboard a bit more seamless. However, I can imagine how this migh...

There are quite a few significant changes with ChromeOS 44 Stable. One that is slightly harder to spot - but quite useful is the ability to pin websites to the 'Shelf' (taskbar at the bottom of the screen). Little demo: Just be aware, if you have a managed device, your administrator may pin apps to the shelf for you, in which case this won't work.

I pin various apps to the shelf in ChromeOS for our users and for a while have wanted to pin the very useful 'Files' app. Its slightly non obvious how to do this as it's not a WebStore app as it's built into ChromeOS. So go to the pin apps dialogue (in user settings of Chrome Management) and add a custom app: App ID: hhaomjibdihmijegdhdafkllkbggdgoj URL: http://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx Click save and you are done.

If you want to block ads in Chrome Adblock Plus is a good option. It can be deployed to PCs via group policy in the same way as any other extension. However, once installed it opens up its own startup page that you may not want. There are good instructions here  on how to remove the startup page. But if you want a little more explanation see below: First, add the app to your list of force install extensions. You need to add: ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn;https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx Next add a registry key: You find these in Group policy preferences. So set the Hive to HKLM Key path to: Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\3rdparty\extensions\ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn\policy Value name:  suppress_first_run_page Value type: REG_DWORD Value Data: 1 Base: Decimal Apply the policy to the appropriate users. Adblock Plus will now silently install the next time a user logons on and fires up Chrome. You might want to bloc...