Like most people I have a love-hate relationship with my email inbox. Over the years I've tried all kinds of tricks and tools to try to handle my inbox more efficiently. What I've found is that those tricks and tools only work if I also use a time-blocking strategy to decide to clear my inbox (something I only started doing after reading Cal Newport's Deep Work for the second time). Once I have my time block in place then the following tools help me work through my inbox in a relatively efficient manner. Message Templates/ Canned Responses Gmail and Outlook will let you create message templates that you can quickly use as responses to emails or as the basis of an entirely new email. This video will show you how to use Canned Responses in Gmail. Outlook users can create canned responses to use to answer frequently asked questions in your inbox. Here’s a good video overview of how to create and use canned responses in Outlook.

Free Technology for Teachers

To move students past entering simple queries into Google and onto conducting research, we should show them that Google.com is not the only search engine they can use. There’s a good chance that your school library and or local public library pays for a subscription to a database of academic articles. A few examples of those include JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and ScienceDirect. The librarians in your school and public libraries will be happy, perhaps thrilled that you asked, to show your students how to access those databases through a library login.

Over the weekend I was asked if I had a video of the process. I didn't have one, so I made this short one to demonstrate how to use Google's advanced search function to find publicly shared Google Docs, Slides, Forms, Sheets, and Drawings. Take a look and feel free to share if you think it can be helpful your students or colleagues.

 Last week I posted a video that contained a quick overview of five Jamboard features that are helpful to teachers and students. That was just the latest in a series of videos that I have made about Jamboard over the last couple of years. To learn more about Jamboard and how you might use it in your classroom, take a look at the following videos. Free Technology for Teachers:

Type Studio is a new video editing tool. When I used it for the first time yesterday I actually said aloud, "Whoa! That's Awesome!" What made me say that was using the editor to clip a section of video. With video editing tools you have to drag and select a section to delete it or enter time stamps of a section to delete it. In Type Studio I simply selected a few words from the transcript of my video and hit the delete key on my keyboard to remove a section of my video. After reading my first paragraph you might be saying, "that's great, but what if I don't have a transcript of my video?" Type Studio creates a transcript for you when you upload your video into their editor. Depending on the length of the video this can just a few minutes or can be quite a bit longer than that. Once the transcript is created it appears your Type Studio editor alongside your original video. Then to cut a section of your video all you have to do is select the words or sentences you want to remove and Type Studio will remove the corresponding section of the video itself. Type Studio currently supports fifteen languages. In addition to providing tools for clipping and cutting your videos, Type Studio provides a subtitling service. You could use Type Studio just to create subtitles and transcripts without having to actually do any editing of your video.