Advanced Gmail Search Operators

Did you know that you can quickly search your Gmail account for messages to or from specific people?

Did you know that you can search for email that only contains attachments?

Did you know that you can search for email within a specific date range?

Did you know that you can search for email by size?

If you haven't recently reviewed the advanced search operators available in Gmail, check them out here.

You can also watch the following video from The Google Gooru that was recently created and highlights a few of the operators.

Read&Write add-on for Google Docs

Thanks to the Free Technology for Teachers blog by Richard Byrne, I learned about the Read&Write add-on for Google Docs.  Installing this Chrome Web App provides the following features within Google Docs:

• Text To Speech with Dual Synchronized Highlighting.
• Talking Dictionary
• Picture Dictionary
• Vocabulary Tool
• Study Skills tools to capture Google highlights

This could be a valuable tool for students at all levels, but especially those with learning disabilities, struggling readers, and English Language Learners.  Check out the video below for more details and a demonstration.

New Gmail Compose and Reply Experience Coming Soon

On October 30, 2012 I read a blog post that announced the new Gmail compose and reply experience that will be rolled out in the near future.  I found the ability to test this out in my personal Gmail account and put together the following sneak peek of what's to come.

Choose Your Own Adventure Google Forms

Have you ever wanted to create a single Google Form that displays different questions based upon the users answers?  Check out my screencast below to learn how to use page breaks and the "go to page based on answer" option with multiple choice questions to accomplish this task.

  You can also try out my live example here.

Be sure to change the resolution to 720 HD and watch this video in full screen mode.

Sometimes it's the little things - Canned Responses in Gmail

I get it. We live in a time when people want information when they want it, on their terms, and that fits their timelines and needs. As the Director of Technology for my district, when I share something new with our faculty, it may not be needed by everyone at that time. It may eventually be helpful at a later date, however, and I certainly can't expect our faculty to archive and index every email I send them. So, what to do? This year, one new thing we started was a faculty tutorials Google site that we use to archive every tutorial, screencast, and other training materials that gets produced by a variety of technology leaders in the district. This provides a phenomenal repository of resources that teachers can peruse to find something specific or to just see what's new. It also makes it very easy for me to respond to an email inquiry by just sharing a link to a section of the tutorials site. While this has been tremendously beneficial, it doesn't help in every situation. There are times when a more personal touch is needed or when someone asks me a question that does not have a tutorial as an answer. This is where canned responses in Gmail comes in very handy. Instead of storing information in a variety of files that would require me to find, open, copy, and then paste the information into my current email, I can keep everything I need right where I need it... in my inbox. A couple examples of how I use canned responses include storing the details about our Dell employee purchase program and the details of the resolution to a common SlideRocket account problem. Both of these are randomly needed a few times every year. Storing them as canned responses that can be added to any email has been extremely helpful and a big time saver for me.  Canned responses are even great to just store those phrases and sentences I find myself using over and over.  Yep, sometimes it's the little things that make me happy. If you'd like to learn a little more about setting up and using canned responses, please watch the SlideRocket presentation below.