Mr Casal's List: Google Apps

There are millions of web resources you can access on any web-based device, but here are a few suggestions for web apps that you can find in the Google Chrome Web Store or that simply work directly in your browser without the need of an app. These work in the Chrome browser, on a desktop or laptop, and of course they work on Chromebooks.

"There are a ton of Google tools that you should try out. But not all of them are relevant to your classroom. What’s a teacher to do? Well, leave it to the Daily Genius team who had waaay too much fun making this graphic and list. We experimented with every single one of these tools to make sure they’re highly useful.


First, check out the graphic we worked hard on making for you. Then, scroll past the graphic to view links and descriptions of each tool. Want to add a Google tool? Do so down in the comments of this post – just add the tool and how to use it in the classroom. Looking forward to your contribution(s)!"

15 Lesson plans for teaching proper Google searching.

Created by Google

"Come and learn about the Google Apps Scripts - FormEmailer, Doctopus and Autocrat.
FormEmailer - Create a Google Form and provide feedback to students based on their submissions.
Doctopus and Goobric - Your digital copy machine to distribute Google Docs to your students and grade them with a digital rubric.
Autocrat - Create a Google Doc based on individual submissions on a Google Form. "

Great for mixing answer order on in-class quizzes - "This week the Google Drive team announced a great update to Google Forms, allowing you to randomize answer options for a number of different question types. If you’ve been paying attention, Google has released a bunch of of updates to Forms in the past year, taking it from an extremely limited survey tool to a pretty comprehensive option. It still doesn’t serve all needs as of yet, but these recent changes are much appreciated."

"Google Drive is absolutely one of the essential tools in your teaching digital tool kit. Using Google Drive you can have both a cloud storage service available for you anytime anywhere together with a powerful productivity suite that includes tools to write a document, create a drawing, build a presentation, or make a spreadsheet. Now with the syncing functionalities Google introduced lately, you can start a document or presentation on your desktop and finish it in school on your iPad. For me personally there is nothing that beats it even Dropbox and Evernote are not as practical as Google Drive ( personal view )."

8 simple guides to getting the most out of Google Docs - great reference and guide for beginners

"Google Docs provides many ways to go paperless through sharing and collaboration options. There is not just one single right way to use Google Docs for a paperless classroom. Rather there are many tools and features that can be used on their own or in combination to meet your varying needs. This guide will cover many of the most common ways that Google Docs can help teachers and students move away from paper and into a digital-only environment."

"Google Drive  provides a streamlined, collaborative solution to writing papers, organizing presentations and putting together spreadsheets and reports. But besides the basic features, there are lots of little tricks and hacks you can use to make your Google Docs experience even more productive. Here are 100 great tips for using the documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Google Docs."

"Yesterday the Google Drive team announced one of the biggest updates to Docs and Sheets that we’ve seen in a long time. The new Add-ons feature for Docs and Sheets makes it really easy to bring some advanced functionality, or just some missing features, to your most important Drive files.

With this new Add-ons feature comes a brand new marketplace with dozens of options to choose from. We suggest playing around some of them to see which ones fit your specific needs, but there are a few that we really like already. Check them out below, or you can learn how to add these tools to your Docs and Sheets in this video."

Great list of Google Drive shortcuts, tips, tricks, and lessons/unit plan ideas.

"Google Maps has recently released the Google Map Gallery which is a platform where you will have access to a wide range of map collections spanning different topics and subjects. I spent sometime browsing through the featured selections there and thought you might want to have a look as well."

"Here’s a small piece of news that might mean a lot to teachers who assign research papers—and to the students who write them.

Last week, Google released some new features for Google Docs, its web-based word-processing software. The updates include a new item in your menu bar, called Add-ons, that gives writers access to a wide selection of new, third-party tools. Several of these apps are specifically designed for writing and evaluating research work.

The best thing about these new tools? They’re free! This release from Google marks one fewer reason for teachers and students to depend on Microsoft Word, the proprietary and expensive software that has traditionally dominated the paper-writing process. Definitely welcome news for students (and adjuncts) on tight budgets."