As of Friday, April 18th, the faculty and staff migration to Google Apps for Education is more than eighty percent complete. Because so many faculty members have been migrated in the last month, we want to remind you that we’re holding Google Apps training every week on Tuesday and Thursday. You can find the full schedule here. There’s no need to sign up, just drop in and get answers to your questions about creating, collaborating, and sharing with Google Apps.

Many of you may have noticed that Gmail now has a new compose window that you’ll see when writing an email. The new compose setup features a few advantages, including the ability to minimize drafts in progress and to open the email you’re composing in a separate window. To find out more about the new compose experience, click here.

That brings us to our tip for this month. During training, many people have asked us if you can automatically open a new email in a new window, and the answer is yes. If you hold down the SHIFT key on your keyboard and click COMPOSE, a blank email will open in a new window in front of your inbox. You can find additional tips for making the most of the new compose experience over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Simmons Technology is pleased to report that we have completed more than half of all faculty and staff Google Apps for Education migrations. The project is moving forward on schedule and should be complete by late May.

As we move forward, we would like to remind you that Meeting Maker will be decommissioned at the end of June. If your department is now using Google Calendar and you want your Meeting Maker account removed, please contact the Service Desk. For more information, and tips for moving your meetings to Google Calendar, please see our full Meeting Maker FAQ.

If you have started using Google Apps and you have questions, you can find many answers on the project site or from within Google Apps by clicking on “More” and then “Google Apps Training” in the black bar at the top of your email. We’re also hosting trainings every week, where we cover Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and the other available apps. To find an upcoming session, check the training calendar.

Beginning this month, we’ll also be providing some advanced tips and tricks to make Google Apps even more useful. Here’s the first one: Did you know that you can drag messages to a label right from your inbox? Just click and hold on or near the checkbox next to a message and drag it to the label you want to use. Your message has been organized with one click and without leaving your inbox.

As more faculty move to Google Apps for Education, we want to provide some ideas for how you can use the apps in your classes. We would also like to hear from you. If you have interesting or innovative use cases, please send an email to [email protected]. We would be happy to feature your stories in an upcoming newsletter.

Create
You can use Google Drive to quickly create and share lecture notes and presentations. Gather the information you need, create your doc or presentation in Drive, and then click “share” and copy the link to send to your students.

Collaborate
In addition to creating your own documents and presentations, you can also use Drive to start projects and then invite students to collaborate. Students can also use Drive to create assignments and then share them with you in order to get feedback. Drive allows for real-time chat, multiple comment conversations, and maintains a full history of revisions. You can work with students to develop a paper or presentation and track their progress as you provide feedback.

Collect
Need to gather information from students at the start of the semester? Looking for an easy way to create appointments during your office hours? Try Google Forms. You can create forms from within Drive in order to gather feedback quickly and track the results in a spreadsheet.

Empower
Your students can use Google Sites to compile portfolios or gather resources for a group project. Sites allows for embedding of documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and more, making it the perfect place to create and display projects while gaining valuable technology and communication experience.

To find out more about each of the apps and what they can do, visit the Google Apps project site and click on the links under the “Using Google Apps” section.