Massac Tech Ed

One of the neat features in Google Docs I recently ran across involves entering in special characters. I was drawing up a table and I specifically wanted a check mark in one of my columns. I knew the location of where to insert the special characters, but also uncovered a very useful tool in the process. If you are in Google Docs, click Insert, then Special Characters in the drop down menu. The following window opens up. Over on the right side, you see an area that says Draw a symbol here. With your mouse, draw the desired symbol. After you draw the symbol, you will notice that your desired symbol should appear in the search results on the left. Click the symbol and it will appear on your document.  Try another one. In my opinion, not only is it useful, but it is pretty fun as well. Just another tool to be aware of as we further expand into our use of Google.

A couple of days ago, Google announced Drive for Education. While this does not seem like a landmark announcement, the biggest piece of news was the following: Unlimited storage : Store as many Google Drive files, Gmail messages, and Google+ photos as you need. Individual file sizes up to 5TB will be supported. Google currently offers our staff and students 30GB of storage per account. The move to unlimited is an even greater step in making sure everything is backed up and accessible online, as well as further helping the idea of going paperless. There is no timetable for when our accounts will have unlimited space, but it is coming. Another key part of the announcement was the offering of Google Vault for free . This is the archiving service that is offered to retain data for our district. Since 2009, we have paid for data archival, so this will result in savings of about $3,500 per year. It appears that this will begin for us January 2015. The final feature that w