Google TakeOut, Cleanup and More

Google TakeOut

Google offers an excellent service for students who are graduating or moving, as well as teachers retiring or moving to a new school to save and move your files and all your data.  It is called Google TakeOut and Mr. Duffy has now enabled this for our district.  There are several good blog posts with tutorials out there to choose from: Kyle Pace has his take, Sean Beard, his version, Jeff Bradbury's podcast and my favorite Jenn Judkins.  Sean has a nice handout, if you prefer a print version.  I shared Jenn's video below. Her site has a nice set of written instructions to follow along with as well. I used the service when I switched schools and it was relatively fast and painless... and that was 4 years ago.

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Google Data Gif Maker

Google recently announced a new tool to make animated Gifs from data.  I read about it here, confess that I have not tried it out myself.  Got boring data? Jazz it up with the new Data Gif Maker.  Here are some basic directions. You can play with it here.  I just used their basic example to make a gif to show you. It does seem to take forever to download from their site and that was with pretty much no real data. Perhaps it is just pokey hilltown internet. 

Google Classroom Cleanup

For many teachers this has been the first full year of Google Classroom.  Now that the school year is coming to a close, Eric Curts has some excellent advice on how to clean up your virtual classroom to keep things organized and ready to go next year. His six steps to success are on his blog.  Check it out; you'll be glad you did.  Although I must say there has been some discussion about #6 on Google + as some folks never, eveh, touch anything in "shared with me" unless they are moving it to "My Drive", but some folks do clean it out, etc.
Kim Nilsson+2
I would never recommend #6.
Not under any circumstances.
It's way too easy that type of "cleaning" gets out of hand.
Much easier to just teach students and staff "that's where everything shared with you is listed", period.

"If you wish to organise stuff shared with you, add it to your My Drive. If not, don't do anything."
EPSB District Technology was inspired by Eric's post to make the video below.

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