Tag Archives: all things google

May 20, 2013, 8:00 am

Updates to ScheduleOnce for Google Calendar Appointments

After everyone finished gasping at the news that Google was canceling Calendar Appointments, which we reported about last winter here at ProfHacker, many faculty pursued other online solutions for allowing students and colleagues to view available appointment times and make reservations. (And a brief note before the comments start coming in – Google has indeed since stated that they will keep Google Calendar Appointments for Google Apps for Education, Business, and Government users, but many ProfHacker readers still need the functionality for their personal Google accounts, which they want to use for this purpose.)

ScheduleOnce is one option that many educators are using, and the site’s blog just announced a number of very useful updates to the system. You can read more about them here, but below are a few highlights:

The scheduling confirmation email and calendar event now have …

April 11, 2013, 11:00 am

Fix Tab Overload in Chrome with OneTab

By Brian Croxall

If you’re like me, you probably have more than a couple of tabs open on your browser of choice. If you’re a lot like me, then you actually have three different browser windows open with the number of tabs in each window ranging from five to thirty-seven. There are a lot of reasons to have all those tabs open, we tell ourselves: it’s for a blog post; it’s for my research; it’s something that won’t save well in Pocket or Instapaper. And all of those things may be true. But what is also true is that all of these tabs take a toll on your computer’s performance.

What you real need is the ability to get all of these tabs summarized into one handy place. A way to keep them as a list without having to copy and paste URLs, so you can get back to what you want to read when you have the time. What you need, it turns out, is OneTab. OneTab is a free, simple extension for the Chrome browser. The…

March 14, 2013, 8:00 am

Google Reader to Shut Down: Now What?

By George Williams

If you were on Twitter yesterday, you would have noticed that in addition to many people commenting on the new pope, there was great outrage over Google deciding to shut down its Google Reader service, which is a very handy one-stop-shop for keeping up with all of your RSS feeds.

(Not sure why you would want to do this? Check out Jason’s introduction to RSS, Amy’s explanation of how she uses Google Reader, and Julie’s discussion of RSS readers.)

Google’s explanation for their decision is pretty straightforward: “There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.”

That being said, people are not happy.

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March 1, 2013, 11:00 am

Drive Notepad: A Browser-Based Text Editor for Google Docs

By George Williams

On Monday, I showed you how to host a website on Google Drive, which is a free and easy hosting solution. What if you want to edit the content you’ve uploaded to your website? Well, in a helpful comment, ProfHacker reader Chris Clark points us to a Google Drive app called Drive Notepad, which turns out to be a pretty darned impressive text editor: “View and edit all kinds of text documents in your browser. Includes syntax highlighting for many scripting and programming languages.”

This app is not affiliated with Google, but is the creation of a developer listed as “DM” on the app’s page. To use Drive Notepad, you need to first get the browser Google Chrome (if you’re not already using it) and then go to this page in the Chrome Web Store, where you can install the app. (For help with installing, managing, and uninstalling Google Drive apps, check out this help page.)

I’ve only just …

February 25, 2013, 8:00 am

Host a Website on Google Drive

By George Williams

Google-Drive Last month, Mark showed us how to use Google Drive to host a continuously-updating archive of a Twitter account. Doing so means taking advantage of a new Google Drive feature, “site publishing.”

Now, maybe I just hadn’t had enough coffee when I was working on implementing “site publishing,” but it seems to me that the instructions provided by Google are not as helpful as they could be. It’s actually pretty easy, so I put together what may be an excessively detailed, step-by-step guide for under-caffeinated people like me. (This guide assumes you already have some HTML content you’d like to publish. And, as always, be mindful of the stability and security–or lack thereof–in the cloud. )

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January 23, 2013, 8:00 am

Improve Your Results with Google’s Advanced Power Searching MOOC

By Brian Croxall

At ProfHacker, we’re big fans of all things Google. We like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and even have a soft spot for Google Hangouts, the video chat tool that includes document sharing and editing. Google does so much for us, it is sometimes hard to remember that it all started with its eponymous search tool. (Of course, Google doesn’t really do anything for us; as Amy pointed out last year when Google’s new privacy policy went into effect, we are not Google’s customers so much as its products. Siva Vaidhyanathan has a few things to say about the Googlization of Everything as well.)

Now, you might think that there’s not a lot that you need to know about searching with Google. It more or less does what you want it to: find what you’re looking for on the Internet. But then again, I’m betting that ProfHacker readers know a thing or two more about searching than the…

December 17, 2012, 11:00 am

Google Calendar cancels appointment slots: implications for scheduling office hours

By Heather M. Whitney

Here at ProfHacker we love us some online scheduling of office hours, with posts going back to 2009 on the topic. Over the years we have covered tools like Tungle, Acuity, Jiffle, Doodle, and perhaps the most-widely used, Google Calendar Appointments. But Friday, a little seemingly innocuous “winter cleaning” post came out from Google, with information on tools they are phasing out. When the post came through my RSS reader I dutifully checked in to see if any of my favorites were on the list, although usually they aren’t. But there was the big one:

On January 4, 2013, we’ll be shutting down several less popular Google Calendar features. You’ll be unable to create new reservable times on your Calendar through Appointment slots, but existing Appointment slots will continue working for one year.

I will admit, an audible gasp escaped my lips. I, and several other faculty I know, on…

December 10, 2012, 8:00 am

Found Knows Where Your Files Are

By Jason B. Jones

ProfHacker readers are unusually bright and well-organized people, obviously, so this probably only happens to me: You’re *certain* you saved a file, or at least saw it . . . but where? Did you save it to a local folder? Dropbox? Evernote? Maybe it was an attachment to a message in Gmail? Oh, wait–it was a Google Doc! Right?

As with Joey Tribbiani trying to open milk, there’s gotta be a better way!

Found is a free app for Macs that searches both local and cloud services to find your files. In addition to searching key folders on your local drive, it will also search Dropbox, Evernote, SkyDrive, Gmail, and Google Drive/Google Docs. There’s a video demo here.)

Found is preposterously fast, returning search results as you type. It lives in the menu bar, but the best way to invoke it is by double-tapping (cf. Zombieland) the CTRL key. The Found window appears on the left of…

November 30, 2012, 8:00 am

All Things Google: The New Gmail Compose

By Brian Croxall

We’re probably at the point here at ProfHacker where we might not have to tell you that we tend to like all things Google. So I was plenty interested when Gmail rolled out a new interface for writing a few weeks ago that makes it a lot easier to multi-task while writing emails.

In the past, composing email worked in the same way that reading them did: it took up your entire screen. The new writing environment drops a compose window in the lower-right corner of your inbox.

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May 22, 2012, 1:00 pm

Update: ‘Google Search Education’

By George Williams

Google’s search engine is a powerful and impressive tool for locating information online. Unfortunately for many students, the simplicity of the default search interface can lead to some pretty poor search habits and results. As I wrote in a previous post about Google’s efforts to provide information literacy resources, “it’s often a challenge (in my experience) not only to get students to search using something other than Google; it’s also difficult to teach them how to use Google effectively.”

In that previous post, I pointed readers to something Google was calling their “Search Education Evangelism” site, a resource designed to make it easier for instructors to teach information literacy. This week I received notice that Google has moved that resource to a new location, given it a different name, and updated the content.

The new site is called “Google Search Education.” As…