Community Update – July/August 2017

[Rob Clarke]

Kia ora [First Name],

We hope you are having a great term and enjoying the lighter mornings. I am managing to get more running in without freezing myself to death and looking forward to more mountain biking.

For Father’s Day we went skiing at Mt Hutt which has had the most brilliant season, here is a shot of us after the day.

 

Plus I couldn’t help share, how’s this for a Father’s Day card from the child of a Google consultant:

It has been great to see many of our members at the CES conferences in Christchurch, Wellington, and Auckland. In particular, thank you to Dayna and Dehana for helping me in Auckland!

Welcome to the following new members: Frances, Rhonda from Windwhistle School, Donna from Selwyn House, Lisa from Waiheke, Fiona from van Asch Deaf Education Centre, Sharon from Leithfield, Annabel, Jenine and Cheryl from Little River, as well as Alyson from Akaroa Area School.

We are delighted to see members completing online courses. Well done to these people: Frances, Rhonda and Raewyn for completing Google Sheets & Forms for the Office 1.

New Features

1. Download certificates of achievement on completion of a course. You’ll also receive an overview of that course by email to keep as your record of learning.
2. If you have completed a course recently (prior to these features being released) please go to the end of the course and download your certificate – you’ll need to make sure you’ve ticked off all objectives throughout the course.
3. We have more new features coming soon.

These new features will be especially helpful if you want to demonstrate your learning when you have your next appraisal or goal setting meeting, or if you have an eportfolio to keep. Below is an example certificate:

New Courses

We’ve got new courses for you to take advantage of:

1. Organise Your School With A Staff Booklet – this is a short course (10 videos consisting of just over 30 minutes) which accompanies one of our most popular template for G Suite, the Staff Booklet. This template brings a wide range of organisational information into one place, thus making it MUCH easier for staff to find key documents. If you work through this course and implement this template it will make a huge difference to the organisation of your school.
2. Tame Your Email – Fundamentals – a short course to help familiarise you with the email interface. This course will be followed by two more we are working on now to take enable you to really take control of your mail.
3. Best Practices for Organising Cloud-based Systems – coming soon. You will learn important key concepts about working in the cloud, plus loads of handy tips and tricks to save time and make yourself more efficient.

In accompany our new courses, we’ve created a couple of new discussion forums for members.

New in the forums:

Finally, here are some handy tips that may be useful to you:

1. Convert text to ALL CAPS, lower case and more in Google Docs…
2. Establishing file and folder naming protocols…
3. Google Keep as a powerful note taking, list making tool…
4. Creating a list that is preceded with zeroes in Google Sheets… (Niva)
5. How the staff portal works… (Frances & Rhonda live tutorial)
6. How to set up a group email list for parents… (Annabel)
7. How to rotate text in a Google Sheet… (this one is a GREAT update!)

Enjoy the rest of the term,

Rob

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