12-10-2024 Tuesday Tech Tips

    

In today's edition, read all about how to personalize the icons and colors of your sections in IC, a fun and powerful AI tool from Google called NotebookLM, important changes to how Guardians receive Google Classroom summary invitations, and more! ➡️ ➡️➡️

💡 Quick Tip 💡 Is your Gmail inbox cluttered with more junk than relevant messages?  How do you locate all these messages to unsubscribe without going through every email in your account?   Speed up the process by going to Gmail and typing unsubscribe in the search bar at the top. A list of every message containing the word “unsubscribe” will appear. You can then go through these emails and click the unsubscribe link.

Personalize the icon and color for each of your classes in Infinite Campus by changing them from the default. For example, if you teach Earth Science and color-code your classes, you can have red, orange, and green Earth icons next to their respective classes. Just click the gear icon next to each of your classes, and personalize them today!

Thanks to Colleen Thorndike from ODY for sharing this awesome tip! Do you have a tip or idea for the Tuesday Tech Tips? Or a request for a topic or question you'd like to know more about? Please let us know! You can email us at joseph.lombardo@greececsd.org with your submission.

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There's a new AI tool from Google that we're very excited about: Notebook LM  

You can upload PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides, and NotebookLM will summarize them and make interesting connections between topics, all powered by Gemini 1.5’s multimodal understanding capabilities.  NotebookLM's main purpose is to make a very specifically trained AI based on content you feed it. You can then ask it specific questions, it can make study guides, FAQ's, briefing docs, etc.  It even has a "Discussion" output that will create a podcast based on the information you supply. 

For example, let's say that you didn't have a chance to read the most recent Tech Tips.  Using NotebookLM, we turned them into a podcast that you can listen to any time HERE.  What better way to spend your time on your drive home from work today than listening to a Tuesday Tech Tips podcast?!  All it took was providing the link to the Tips in NotebookLM, and it created a podcast for us, which (like any output from any AI source), we could edit as needed.  

NotebookLM is available to GCSD staff (not students) HERE.  Give it a try!  It does not use your personal data, including your source uploads, queries, and the responses from the model for training.

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On December 9th, we made two important changes to how Guardians receive Google Classroom summary invitations. Previously, guardians received a one-time invitation when their child reached third grade or they first joined the district. If they did not accept this invitation, they needed to ask a teacher to remove and re-add them to Google Classroom to receive summaries. We updated this process so that, beginning in third grade, parents and guardians who have not signed up for Google Classroom Summaries will receive automatic invitations three times a year: in the first week of September, January, and March. To ensure that only parents and guardians with a legal right to receive this information have access, only those listed as Guardians in Infinite Campus will be included in Google Classroom. Any individuals who should not have access were removed on December 9th. If parents or guardians contact a teacher for access, please refer them to the main office in their building to file the necessary paperwork. After December 9th, teachers in Google Classroom will no longer have the ability or any responsibility for adding guardians. If you have any questions, please reach out to Brad Malone, Executive Director of Technology.

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Thanks to everyone who submitted a response to our Form letting us know what you think of the new Form rating scale question type. (Very meta, as the kids say.)

We like and appreciate all of you so much, we decided that everyone who submitted a response wins great prizes! They were just sent via interoffice courier, please be on the lookout for those soon.

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For assistance with these topics, or anything else related to instructional technology, please click HERE to book an appointment with your building's ITT.

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