Pinning tabs in Google Chrome browser

Pinning tabs in Google Chrome can be a great way to keep your most frequently used websites easily accessible and organized. Whether you're a teacher using Chrome for research and lesson planning or a student looking to keep your class schedule and online resources handy, pinning tabs can make your browsing experience more efficient and streamlined.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to pin tabs in Google Chrome:

Step 1: Right-click on the tab that you want to pin. This will open a context menu.

Step 2: Select "Pin Tab" from the menu. The tab will shrink in size and be moved to the leftmost side of the tab bar.

Step 3: The tab is now pinned and will stay open even when you close other tabs. To unpin a tab, right-click on the pinned tab and select "Unpin Tab" from the menu. Alternatively, you can also use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + Shift + T to pin or unpin the tab.

One of the advantages of pinning tabs is that it can help you save space on your browser. Pinned tabs take up less space than regular tabs, making it easier to navigate and find the tabs you need. This is especially useful for teachers who may have multiple tabs open for research and lesson planning, as it can be difficult to find the right tab among a sea of open tabs.

Another advantage of pinning tabs is that it can help you stay organized. By pinning your most frequently used websites, you can quickly access them without having to search through all of your open tabs. This can save you time and make your browsing experience more efficient.

Pinned tabs also have the added benefit of staying open even when you close other tabs or exit the browser. This means that you won't have to spend time reopening tabs or searching for the websites you need every time you open your browser. This is especially useful for teachers who may have to switch between different tasks or classes throughout the day.

In conclusion, pinning tabs in Google Chrome can be a useful tool for both teachers and students. It can help save space, increase organization, and save time. So next time you're browsing with multiple tabs open, consider pinning the ones you use most often for a more efficient browsing experience.

Are your students safe with Gmail?

Students' safety in schools. 

A school, just like a home, must be able to provide safety and security such that learning may take place without hindrance. One of the areas of concern for most educationists is the security of the learners.   Learning in the 21st century requires students to collaborate and use technology in their learning among other dimensions too. Emails are a great tool for effective and formal digital communication at school and failure to enforce some security or code of conduct may end up making students vulnerable to some cyber criminal activities. To make use of all Gmail applications, the teachers and students must have an email they use. Fortunately, Google mail has some features that would require to be looked at and ensure the students' safety. 

Some pundits may argue that students must never have access to emails at school and proponents of the usage of digital tools think that this thought is retrogressive and of the yesteryears. The digital world is here for everyone and instead of resisting it, we must embrace it and use it to enhance teaching and learning. The following blog post is going to look at some ideas on how one may make use of the inbuilt features of Google mail to enhance the safety of learners. Google apps for education has some inbuilt features and tools that make it possible to provide a safe working environment for teachers and students. 

Organisational Units (OU)

In the Google admin console, organisational units must be created and have units according to the organisation's functional area. All students must have sub-units where there are lower primary, upper primary, and lower and upper secondary units. Organisational units are important in ensuring that certain permission is given to a certain group of individuals. 

Some configurations to consider. 

1. Emails are to be limited to certain individuals in the organisation. Senior students may have their emails barred from sending an email to younger students. 

2. Restricting communication from outside the organisation. Emails for students must be restricted from emailing outside the school organisation. This enables them to be safe from spamming, phishing or hacking. The school may white list some domains for example if it is a sister school for collaboration purposes. 

3. Bad word list- The bad word list can be enabled to quarantine, reject or modify any email that may contain words deemed bad. 

4. Blocking students from sending emails to email distribution lists ensures that students do not send bad things to their peers. 

5. Google vault- this can be used to retrieve and search emails from any user, especially where there may be allegations of misuse or cyber-criminal activities. 

6. Email forwarding to personal accounts may be disabled too. 

All these rules may be adjusted to different grades differently. Thanks to the OU feature in the google admin console.  Stricter organisational rules enable the safety of our children from the marauding criminals whose modus operandi has now shifted to online. 

SOME CHROME SETTINGS YOU MUST DO

 A browser is a software designed to open websites. You cannot get into a website without having a browser first. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and opera are the most popular browsers.  Security and privacy need to be enhanced for a safe browsing exoperience . There are cyber criminals on the prowl and would seize every slightest possible opportunity to pounce on you. Here I am going to write of the settings you must do on your chrome browser to enhance privacy and security while browsing. 

1. Site permissions 

Some websites may access your camera, location, and microphone and this may jeopardize your privacy. 

Go to settings/privacy and security/site settings. 

You will then see a radio button and check on don't allow sites to see my location.  It is here where you will also see the other sites that have permission to see your location. Check if you are not being tracked by any website. 

2. Secure DNS and Connections.

Using secure connections will help you not to connect to sites that can scam you. To enhance this you go to settings/privacy and security/security and then turn on always use secure connections then turn on always use secure DNS. 

3. Pop-Ups and Redirects

Most websites have annoying pop-ups and redirect you to other websites. If this happens you may be redirected to a site that has security issues. Therefore disabling these pop-ups is recommended for safe browsing. To disable pop-ups go to settings/privacy and security/site settings then Don't allow sites to send pop-ups or use redirects. 

4. Third-party cookies 

Several times you see a message prompting you to accept cookies whenever you are browsing. It is advisable to n]block third-party cookies. Cookies will make your browsing history known by third parties and they are used to track your interests which enables you to streamline the kind of adverts you may watch online. 

settings/privacy and security /cookies and other site data. 

5. Enhanced protection 

You may need to utilize all of the chrome's protection features by going to settings/security / then turning on Enhanced protection. 

6. Safety check 

You can also check for bad extensions and password breaches from your dashboard. You do this by going to settings/privacy and security / then click check now. 

7. Background apps. 

By default, chrome runs all its apps in the background even if you are not active. This needs to be disabled such that you may have control over what is happening. 

Do this by going to settings/system then turn off and continue background running. 

 8. Browsing incognito window. 

 

Archiving your class in Google classroom .

 By the end of an academic year, it is prudent for a teacher to archive his or her classes in Google classroom to ensure that the students do not have access to them.  Here l am going to show you how to do the process easily. 

You simply go to the home page in your google classroom and choose the class you want to archive. Look for the three dots that you will see if you let your mouse pointer hover on your classroom. 

Select the three dots on the class you intend to archive 

 After that,  you will find an option written archive and you simply click it. 

Select archive 

There will be an option archive again and you select that. Your class would have been archived and the students will no longer have access to it. 

In case you need to use the material from an archived class in the future, here is what you do. Go to the top main menu to the left and click. If you scroll down the menu there will be an option written Archived class and you select that. You will then find all the classes that you archived.  Hover your mouse pointer on the three dots again and then select Restore and another pop-up menu comes and you select restore again. 

The video below may be helpful to you. 

You will be done. Thank you.

NEWSFLASH : LATEST CHANGES IN GOOGLE DRIVE

WHAT'S NEW IN GOOGLE

You can now use familiar keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + C (or ⌘ + C on Mac), Ctrl + X, and Ctrl + V to copy, cut, and paste Google Drive files in your Chrome browser. This saves you time by allowing you to copy one or more files and move them to new locations in Drive, and across multiple tabs, with fewer clicks. Additionally, a link to the file and its title will also be captured when copying a file, which allows you to easily paste them into a document or an email. To help you more easily organize files in multiple locations without necessarily creating duplicate files, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Shift + V will create shortcuts. Lastly, you can open files or folders in a new tab using Ctrl+Enter, so that you can easily view multiple files at once, or use different tabs to more easily organize files between two different folder locations.

References

1. Google workspace .

***NEWSFLASH*** GOOGLE DOCS NEW FEATURES

 These are the new features from Google docs that are worthy of trying. 

1. TABLE TEMPLATES 

 Google docs have been upgraded to include table templates and drop-down chips. These are two new enhancements for a  flexible and smart canvas for collaboration. This is found in the insert tab and then select table. The table has another drop-down menu with templates and an option for customization. 

Go to the insert tab  then as usual you look for the table option and the drop-down arrow leads you to table templates that have : 

The product roadmap, review tracker, projects assets, and launch content creator. 

The product roadmap template has a table that has a project, status, related fields, and as table headings. The status has the drop-down menu already plugged in for you. However, if you click on add/edit options you can customize the options. 

2. DROP DOWN MENU

You can also create drop-down menus! Wow! This is useful in cloze passages or exercises.  Students choose an option from a given set of answers. 

Let's look at the  passage on prepositions below : 

Last Saturday my mother had a big surprise for my sister and I.  We went visiting the amusement park! Excitedly we packed our lunches and hopped into the car. Mother drove along the freeway and across town towards our destination.  Finally, we arrived at Thrills and Chills  Amusement park. We almost started running in a different direction! Mom told us it was important to stay together. We took turns deciding on rides. Fortunately, my favourite ride was right by my sister's favourite rollercoaster.  We rode the rollercoasters bumper cars and racing boats together. At the end of the day we were exhausted from all the fun we all had.  We pretended we were flying over rollercoaster tracks on the way home. I had a wonderful time with my family.

You may want your students to choose the correct prepositions from a list in the drop-down menu.

Let's copy the passage we want into our google docs. Let's highlight and copy and paste all our prepositions at the bottom and probably give them a subheading word bank as shown below.

Now we can use an add-on called doc tools to arrange the prepositions in alphabetical order. Install the add-on and after installation select all your words and look for the add-on from extensions or add-on and select it. Now check on sort the selection ascending. Your words will now be in ascending order alphabetically. We may need our students to cancel out every preposition that they would have selected so we look for checkboxes in our ribbon and the words will now have checkboxes.

Let's go to the insert menu and select the drop-down option. We will see that we have + New Drop-down, Launch status, and other preset Drop-downs. Let's select new Drop-down. On the template name, let's give it the name Prepositions . The first option 1 could be an instruction your students may want to have, for example you can write ________ or select or choose . Let's write the first word from our options on option 2. You can just copy and paste. After option 4 if you still have more options to add , then select + New Option.

You must now click save and you will be done.

Then you can just go to the next gap and repeat the process but before you insert new options you will see , "saved drop down list", and select it.