Digital Fluency Intensive - Week 3. Email Calendar Hangouts.

Today we had an interesting session learning about the details of gmail and calendar. This was - get into the settings and try various combinations - some of which change the GUI, some affect the functionality and usability. The idea was to make these tools more efficient and more "attractive".
Here's an example of a hangout video chat along with screen capture. We picked a student's post at random and discussed their learning from the pak-n-save trip.

Some cool tips for gmail are:

• If we happen to accidentally hit send on an email [guilty as charged :-) ] then depending on the situation a certain level of panic will set it. Did you send it to the wrong Nicki? Did you send confidential docs to ..... Well not anymore! You can setup a "time bomb" arrangement. This gives you upto 30 seconds to UNDO - phew!
• You can arrange for your inbox to have all the unread (or any other criteria) emails displayed at the top.
• Spam control - you can hover the cursor above a name and delete ALL the emails from that address. 
• Gmails can be labelled like blogs
• Filters can be setup with yor criteria so you get to what you are looking for quickly
• and finally yes you can translate an email by selecting the language in the dropdown menu from the arrow next to the reply arrow.

Calendar:

1. we can change the view - not just day/week/ month but we can select the number of days
2. we can also choose to hide morning and evening engagements - if you are like me and keep your personal and professional lives totally separate
3. calendar apps are available for iphones/ androids

Hangouts was fun because we were told to have only ONE mic active, all the others on MUTE. If there was more than one mic we would get a lot of feedback. And in about 5 minutes there was a LOT of feedback. Most of us missed to mute our mics after our turn and.......

Now the challenge for me is to have the time to use some of this in the classroom for us all to be able to Learn Create Share. The journey continues...