I love collaborating with my team (and educators all over NW Ohio!) with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. One of my biggest frustrations is that the comments and suggestions don’t transfer when you make a copy. This means you lose your history of all your collaboration when you duplicate a document, spreadsheet, or presentation.. Now Google is making it possible to copy comments and suggestions any time you make a copy of a Docs, Sheets, or Slides file.
To copy your comments and suggestions, simply select “Make a copy” from the File menu as your normally do. Now you’ll see an option for “Copy comments and suggestions” or “Copy comments.”
Check the box, and you’ll see your comments and suggestions transfer to the new document! The comments and suggestions will contain a note indicating that they were copied from the original document.
Check it out today, and collaborate—even on copies—with ease!
One of the things we might lose when moving to digital tools is communicating with our students. Just like we can leave notes on physical assignments, we can also do this with our digital assignments in Google Classroom.
There are three basic kinds of comments you can leave students in Classroom.
Class Comments: These are comments that you add to your class stream on the “outside” of an assignment or announcement. This type of comment is visible to the entire class, and can be used to answer questions that anyone might have.
Private comments: You can add these comments by viewing assignment results and clicking on an individual student. On the right, below the student submission there is a comment bar. Leave comments here that only the student can see. This is useful if it has sensitive grade or feedback information. You can also add a private comment to a number of students at once when returning an assignment. Check out our previous tech tip on managing private comments.
Comments in a Doc/Slide/Sheet/Drawing: These comments are left on the student’s file that he/she submitted to you. Highlight something you’d like to comment on, then click the black speech bubble icon. This adds a comment on specific items in student work.
Knowing how each of these comments works and when to use each kind will make giving student feedback more efficient and effective.
One of the best features in Google Docs, Slides and Drawings was the Research Tool. Through the Research Tool, which allowed authors to do research simultaneously as they write or edit a document. From one place, you could search different Google services including: Scholar, Images, Quotes, Dictionary.
The great thing about the Research tool is that it allowed an author to easily insert citations and links to a document. Once an image, document, or resource was picked, the user click on “cite” and Google Doc automatically inserts the citation according to the style wanted ( MLA or APA, or Chicago).
Unfortunately, in September 2016, Google dropped the Research tool for the Explore tool in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. While this tool still provides the insights, design tools, and research recommendations that the old tool did, the citations feature was mysteriously missing!
Last week, Google improved upon the Explore tool and brought citations back! Students writing research reports, analysts crafting whitepapers, and others looking to credit their sources can now insert citations as footnotes with the click of a button in Explore in Docs on the web.
You can even change the format of your citation, switching between the MLA, APA, and Chicago styles. For more information on how to use citations in Docs Explore, check out this link in the Help Center.
