Wednesday 10 October 2012

Printing Multiple Documents in Google Docs

Ever have to print multiple documents in Google Docs and wish that there was a faster way?

Well there is, this is a simple workaround to help you be more productive when printing from Google docs. Because there is a step involving converting to a PDF some formatting may be affected, but for the most part this is a great solution.

Step 1: Select all the files to print 

You can do this one by one, or if you have all the files in one folder you can select them all by using the check box at the very top of the list next to where it says "title" in Drive. Go to the "More" button and click on download.


Step 2: Download the files as a PDF document

At the next window you need to tell google docs to convert the files to PDFs. When you press download, it will process the files and then automatically download them all as one zip file.


Step 3: Unzip and open all the PDFs in Preview

Go to your downloads folder and find the zip file. You can move it to your desktop if that helps you to keep track of the files. When you double click on the zip file, it will create a new folder with the same name as the zip file, and place all of the files in there.


Step 4: Print from Preview

Highlight all the files, right click and go to "Open with" and select "Preview". If preview is your default viewer you can just press  - O to open them. When you print the files ( - P) you will see in the page count under the preview that it is printing all of the PDF files that were opened.



Although there are quite a few steps in this process, once you've done it once or twice it becomes straightforward, and it's much, much faster than opening and printing documents one at a time!

If you have any questions about the process, feel free to email me.


Posting to Blogger via Email

Posting to Blogger is a very easy process, but how great would it be if you could simply email directly to your blog? And what about if you're sending the same post to multiple blogs, this could really save you a heap of time and switching between accounts.

If you want detailed instructions to set this up, you can look at the google support site linked here:


Or you can follow these steps.

The first thing you need to do is go into the settings section of your blog this is the page pictured below. 
Once you click on settings, you need to then click on mobile and email.
About halfway down you will see "Posting using email". To start using this feature, you just need to fill in the "secretwords" box with something you will remember.

This will create the email address that you send your posts to. If my secret word was dog in this example the email address I would send posts to would be
Once you have your secret word in you need to press "Save Settings!" that's the most important part.

After you've done that, all you need to do is write your post. The email subject becomes your post title, and the body is the body of your post. You can even put images into your email and they will be added to the post as well.

Unfortunately you can't add labels onto your post when you email it in, but you can add them easily later on.
If you have any questions about this process please get in touch.
Have fun with this,

Shaun


Thursday 4 October 2012

iPad Storage and Charging

The following are some helpful tips I recently sent out to the staff in our primary school regarding charging and storage of classroom iPads.

Charging: avoid charging the iPads every day, recharge when they drop below 10%.

It is not necessary to keep the iPads fully charged all the time. The iPads have a battery life of about 8 hours, and even when they get to 10% will still generally last an hour or more in an actual lesson. Other schools have noted that iPad battery life reduces when the batteries are always being charged, so as a rule you should charge your class set of iPads when you see a few of them getting below 10%.

Don't let the children plug in the iPads when they put the iPads away. It is only necessary to plug them in when charging, and it is better to have an adult do this.


Storage:

If you want to keep your iPads in a cupboard rather than in the carts, that is fine, just make sure that they are in a lockable cupboard and not stacked higher than 6 iPads in stack.