Friday, October 7, 2016

YouTube shortened link "hack" to view full screen

Shorten YouTube URLs to view full screen without suggested videos
Perfect hack for teachers to avoid distractions


I learned a new hack today for YouTube that I just have to share and document to remind myself at a later date.  Do the suggested videos on the side or comments displaying in YouTube distract you when you click a link to show a video to your class?   Some of the videos are not always quite appropriate either which can be troubling.  Fear no more!

Use the following format to force the video to play full screen without comments, ads or suggested videos on the side.  No add-ons or extra sites to go to.
  Original long link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1mGI15UnGQ
  Shortened Link:    https://www.youtube.com/embed/m1mGI15UnGQ

   What did I do?  Replace  watch?v= with EMBED/ 

I love the new hack and hope you do too!



Updates in GSuite - Oct. 2016

Google Apps for Education has a new name!  It's now called G Suite.   Sweet.

All puns aside, the google apps for education suite has gotten a ton of new updates for this fall.  I'll list the newest ones here.  

However, don't forget that in each of the google apps, you can click the training icon to get tutorials for all of the features.

Docs Updates
  • Table of contents feature now includes page numbers for organization.
    • Great for those long documents
    • Perfect for year long meeting logs to jump to sections
    • Perfect for students creating a digital portfolio to jump to each section.
  • Explore feature- used for Docs, Slides, and Sheets 
    • Slides: assist in formatting
    • Docs:  replaces the former "research" tool - web citation has been removed :(  Please use one of the google docs add-ons or extensions to asssist with bibliographic citations, such as Easy Bib.
    • Sheets: helps to create formulas for you more easily
Google Classroom
  • Add topics to the stream at any time
    • You can list all of your topics ahead of time so that whenever you post something to the stream you can just choose your topic.  No need to create them on the fly.  
    • Topics allow you to sort or filter the stream based on topic.  Perfect for teachers and students attempting to locate materials.
  • New Android feature: 
  • New iOS features