OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. There are some things in Google that you might not know about. So that's what I'm kind of focusing, the Google's news about stuff and how to's. All right. So here we go, Chrome, switching between accounts.  Your primary account is actually the person that will be able to open up links or open up files. However, if I send a link to Allison Adams at gmail.com and Allison is on her network Google. Let's say I have no idea, Allison, where you work, but it doesn't matter. I'm going to make up a school for you. She works at Adams Adult School. All right. And her email address is at adams.org. And when she opens the link that I have sent to her gmail, she can't open it because she's in the wrong account. So you can tell Chrome that you want to be signed in to all of these different accounts. And then you can switch between them, which makes life so much easier. And you're probably right now you're going, huh, I'm going to show you how to do this. So here is my work account. Now, it just so happens that the first two letters of my first name are me and the first two letters of my last name are H-O-HO. So I am me-ho with a W, me-how is work. With an M, me-home is home, right? And then I'm scowy tech for my trainer account because me-ho with a T, it just, I didn't like that. So I have a bunch of different accounts that I can sign into. Now, this is going to seem really weird, but I have to do this in order to show you what I'm going to show you. Hang on, just a sec. We're going to pin this and we're going to pin that. I am pinning, so hopefully they will open again. Yes, you can do this. I'm going to be showing you how to do this too as well. I don't need that one. I can throw it away, leave. Okay. So I've just closed Chrome. Oh my God. So here we go. I'm going to open my Chrome browser, follow along if you wish. Now, you might not get this message because you don't have this little checkbox right here, show on startup. All right. Here are all the Chrome accounts that I have currently signed in. I actually have more than this, but I haven't signed into them all. All right. So I can open up Chrome, Chrome. I'm opening up Chrome in any one of these accounts. Chrome and Google are connected. So when you sign into Chrome, you're also signed into Google. When you sign into Chrome, you're also signed into Google. When you sign into Chrome, you can access another Google account, but it might not always work that well. You might not be able to get your Gmail as well as you thought you should be able to because you want to sign into Chrome on all accounts. Okay. So here we go. I'm going to tell it I want to open up my work account and because I pinned my tabs, and yes, I will show you this in a little bit because I pinned my tabs, they come back open for me. Now, here's my work account. And I'm going to try and zoom in a little bit. So the Chrome itself doesn't zoom in, but you can see this little avatar right here. It's kind of reddish, got a red background. That's me, my happy little smiling face, right? Next to the waffle. If I look right above that, I see the Chrome avatar and they are the same. They are the same. So I know that when I click on a link that is sent to my work, it will open up in this account. If I want to go to my drive, it will go to this account. The two are kind of connected, kind of connected. If I want to go to another account, I could do that. I could sign into my, I think I have one open. Yeah. Right here. I could sign into my Blinkabinky account. That's a student account, believe it or not. It's just a fake student account, or I could sign into my SCOE tech using my Google, but I'd never do that. I never do that. What I do is I sign into Chrome on all my accounts. So I'm going to click on the Chrome avatar, not the Google avatar. This is the Google next to the waffle. This is the Chrome next to the puzzle piece in Chrome. I'm going to click on that and watch this magic. I'm going to open up my SCOE tech account. Boom, a different window opens, a different window. Not only that, but it's a different color because I made this account have a blue background. So I know when I open this up, when I'm in this account, I'm on my SCOE tech or my SCOE trainer account. If I wanted to, I could also open up my home account, which is a light blue. But I know that when I open this up, I can get to my home email or my home calendar. And this that I'm shaking right now, my home account is not connected to this, my work or my district account. Melinda, there's a question. Sorry to start over there. Go ahead. Is it possible for you to lock the tab you pinned so you don't accidentally change it? Lock. No, no, no, no, not locking. Okay. Yeah, I've done that to myself too. And when I, and when I noticed that I just hit my back button, I'll show you the pin tabs here in a minute. So on Chrome, you can go between your work accounts. And if you have a Gmail account, which I highly recommend, if you have a district account, so your domain ends in something like at school.edu, have a Google account that you use for work as well. That's what I do between these two accounts. There's a reason for that, because your district might keep you from doing something that you can do with Gmail, with your free account. Okay. This is a district account at school.edu. This is a Google account at gmail.com. If you ever doubt what account you have open, just click on your Chrome avatar, and you will see the email address that is listed up at the top.  Now remember that startup page that I showed you, and you might not have it? It's right here in the gear.  So you might want to select that so that you see this. Every time you open up Chrome, this happens on the device that you're on right now. All right. If I, if I have my laptop, I'm going to have to do the same thing on my laptop. It's not like I turned it on here and it turns on everywhere. I have to do it on each device. All right. Question. Sure. Someone says, I am on, oh, this is Karen Lang on DuckDuckGo. Is that the same as Chrome? DuckDuckGo is not, is a search. It's not, DuckDuckGo is a search. So if you're using Chrome, you will know you're using Chrome because you will see, I don't know.  I don't know if you can see mine. It's way up at the top. I'm on a map. But if you're on a PC, down at the bottom of your task tray, you'll see the red, yellow, green circle with a blue dot in the middle. That'll be enabled. So if you have any doubts, here's what the little icon looks like. So click on it and if the window stays open, you're using Chrome. If you click on it and it opens up, well, there you go. You're opening Chrome. Okay. All right. So know who you are. Know who you are. So you know which account to use, right? I always ask myself, who am I? And I've also given myself that visual cue of a red background for my work account, a blue background for my SCOE tech, and my fake student accounts are all green. So I have a couple of several fake student accounts so I can take screenshots to show teachers, to show teachers, you know, this is what a classroom looks like from a student point of view or this is what Gmail looks like from a student point of view, that type of thing. Okay. And somehow my chat keeps going behind. Here we go. So how can I change my logo picture? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Your logo. So logos or account pictures are, they're in different spots. Okay. So the Chrome avatar, the Chrome avatar has its own logo and the Google avatar has its own logo. You can make them the same or you can make them different. I would recommend you make them the same. On the Chrome, I'm going to click on my Chrome avatar. It's at the right next to the puzzle piece here in the Chrome extension, right? I'm going to click that. And sometimes it has a little camera icon right here and you can click on it and then add a picture or there's a pencil next to your nickname. All right. I've nicknamed myself here and by clicking on the pencil, you can nickname yourself as well. So I clicked on the pencil. Here's where you change your Chrome profile name, your nickname. Okay. You can scroll that and you can pick a theme color for Chrome and we can see right here. Here's the red. Okay. Lots of different colors to choose from. And then I uploaded my avatar. It was given the option to take my or add a Google photo. Now, here's the thing. If you're on a network account, you might be precluded from doing that. So you might just have to settle for one of the avatars here. And on a network account, I'm going to hit my back button here. Wrong back button, Melinda. All right. I'm going to close this. There we go. So on my Google account, that's the avatar be underneath the Chrome avatar. Here's, oh, here we go. Here's a camera icon right here. All right. So I could click on that and upload a photo. Okay. It can change. Well, mine's already uploaded. So I could change or remove it. I don't want to do that. And again, depending on your network, our network is pretty open. It allows the Chrome or the Google icon, Google avatar. There we go. It allows the Google avatar to become the Chrome avatar. Okay. So again, different networks work different ways. When you're on the public account, you don't have any problems. You're going to go to your Google avatar. You're going to click that camera. And then you're going to change it or remove it. It should upload for you. You should be able to upload your own picture. You can also go to accounts.google.com on either account, any account, and you can add your picture there as well. Okay. Alrighty.  Name yourself. You are not person one or person two. Name yourself and make sure that the email matches the person you think you are. All right. So I am scoatechageemail.com on this account. That's why I named, nicknamed Chrome, scoatech. On my work account, my Chrome nickname is Mihao. Okay. And I'm mholt at scoay.net. So don't leave it as person one and person two because you're going to get confused. Is person two work or is it, oh gosh, is this a student account? I can't remember, right? Name yourself. Give yourself a, you know, this is my work. So Amanda work, okay? Or Amanda school, whatever. Alrighty. So that's the Chrome account. Sync when prompted. You will be asked, do you want to sync your accounts? Just say yes. It's okay. Trust me. Your network is not going to be doing anything to your home computer if you sync when you're at home. All right. It won't. I swear to you, I'm a Google administrator. I know these things. Okay. So don't worry about it. Just sync. It's okay to sync. I highly recommend you use a different color scheme for your different accounts. Look at the avatar. Look at the address listed. Make sure you know who you are and ask yourself. This sounds silly, but it helps. Who am I? Where am I? What account should I be using? All right. If I'm at home, I should be me home. If I see me how back up, I'm going to go here and I'm going to choose my home avatar profile. All right. Moving on. You can name your windows. Now, I don't know about you, but I use a lot of tabs and a lot of windows and I go back and forth between my Google trainer and my work, my OTAN. All right. So on the Chrome, you can do this right now. Right now, you're going to right click at the very top of the window, the Chrome window. Just find a blank spot in there next to the plus, next to not on next to the plus, which is the new tab. I want you to right click. Now you could open a new tab after you right click, but don't do that. You could reopen a closed tab. Don't do that either. You could bookmark all of your tabs at the same time. No, don't do that. Name window. There we go. We're going to name the window. I get a little pop up and I just call this work and say, okay. And then I go to my other Chrome and I right click on that window, name that window. And I call this trainer. Why did I do all of that? Because I work on a lot of different accounts. So I'll have a student window open. I'll have a admin window open. And I'm going back and forth between the windows. Now on a Mac, when I click Chrome, the Chrome menu up at the top of my screen, I can click on window and I can see here's my work. Here's my trainer. Whatever has the checkmark next to it, that's the one that's currently in front or open. Okay. So I could minimize my work working on my trainer. I'm doing stuff. I'm going to different sites, blah, blah, blah. And then it doesn't mean, oh, I got to open up my work. I got to check my email. So I click the work window. There it is. Ready to rock and roll. Okay. You can have lots of accounts open at this, or windows open at the same time. And I took a screenshot on a day where I actually had every one of these windows were open. I had Google admin. I had Google tech. I had two student accounts, a trainer account and a work. All signed in, all on different windows, and I just switched between the two. Four, five, six, however many that is. Okay. So naming windows really easy. Just right click on the blank spot on the window and then name it. Here we go. What's next? Pinning tabs. Okay. So pinning tabs saves you real estate. Saves you a lot of real estate. We have somebody at work. I won't name any names. Metta will have 50. I swear to you, 50 tabs open at the same time. All right.  So you can go do, you know, add a new tab, add a new tab, a lot of different websites, whatever. Excuse me. So what you do is you right click on a tab. And then you click pin. And then it goes over to the far left. So now I know right here, I've got my calendar. I've got a Google draw open. I've got my library images slides that I have that I'll show you in a minute. And here's the TDLS slideshow. When you pin a tab, I'm going to close these real quick. Excuse me. When you pin a tab, if you close the window and open it back up, I've already done this, they will all be there for you. They will all be there for you.  No. All right. Then not after you restart your computer, but when you close this Chrome window, or if you close a Chrome window and you pin tabs, they should open up back or they should open back up for you. When you open the Chrome on that account again. Every once in a while, Google has a hiccup and they don't. And sometimes it realizes it hiccups and it will ask you, do you want us to restore your windows? Just say yes. Absolutely. So you don't really lose anything. Alrighty. Another way to organize yourself is to have tab groups. You don't like to pin. That's fine. You can let's say you're working on different projects all at the same time. And let's say that library images and untitled drawing are related. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on the tab, one of the tabs, one of those two tabs that are related. I am going to, what am I going to do? I'm going to add tab to new group. Yes. No. Okay. Add tab to new group. So I'm clicking that. I have to name the group. And you can tell that something's already happened, that the tab that I right clicked on has this line around it now. I'm going to select a different color, make it orange, or I can make it pink. I can make it purple. I can make it any color I want. And I'm going to name this drawings, drawing. Okay. Bada bing, bada boom. This becomes a toggle. So I can click this word called drawing and I lost it. No. All you have to do is click on it again and then it opens. The tab opens. I can add this tab next to it to that same group by right clicking on it, add tab, add tab to group. Now again, I'm given the option of new group still, but now I see that group that I created called drawing. Boom. And now when I click the drawing button, it closes both of those tabs. When I click it again, it opens them. Closed, open. Closed, open. Okay. So you could do this for some, you know, like your, you've got your calendar and your email are related. You've got your calendar open on one tab, your, your email opened on the other. Boom. Put them in a tab group. Call it email or office and then close it. Open it when you need it. Close it when you want it. Right. It's another way to organize and keep, keep everything on the top of your Chrome, your window a little bit more organized and looking better for screenshots. So here you can see two screenshots. We've got, I have two tabs. One's called presentations. The other's called work. Right. And then within the work tab, that's the second picture that's here. I've got mail and the training calendar. And I could have also put my calendar calendar there if I wanted to. So you can put a lot of tabs together in a tab group. If you're doing research, you've got a lot of different sites. Boom. All done. All ready. Reading list. This is something that's relatively new to Google, to Chrome. If you, I don't have a showing. Here we go. Here's my bookmarks bar.  But there's also something called a reading list. So I'm going to go to what I think is a safe site.  We like reading articles. We maybe tech articles, or maybe this is, there's this really great thing that I've heard about teaching web technology. And I want to read more about it, but I don't want to bookmark it.  And then I don't want that bookmark anymore. Right. I just want to read it. So everyone should have a reading list button in their Chrome browser. If you don't see this, then hit your control shift B, control shift B, and that is a toggle for opening up your bookmarks bar and closing your bookmarks bar. Open, closed, open. Right. I'm going to hit reading list now that I see it. And I'm going to click on add current tab so that I can come back to it later and read it. That is saved for you just like a bookmark. Well, why don't you use bookmarks, Melinda? Because I just want to read it and then I want to get rid of it. I want to read it and get rid of it. I don't want to bookmark it. I've got enough bookmarks already. Okay. So I'm going to hit that reading list and let's say I've already read the OTAN. All I have to do is I could mark it. Right. Or I can delete it. Boom. It's gone. Now I have the other things that I wanted to read. Oh, I did the wrong one, didn't I? Oh, it doesn't matter. But this was just done as a demo for you. All right. Okay. So reading lists, really good to have, especially for articles that you just want to save it for later. And it's saved to your account. So when you sign into Chrome and you save something to the reading list on your Gmail, that's where it will appear. If you saved it when you were using your work account, then that's where it will appear. Yes, I will be sharing this presentation. Who is that? Noel. All right. Shortcuts. Shortcuts. Shortcuts are really cool because they're quicker than bookmarks sometimes. So everyone go to google.com. Google.com. Melinda, just real quick. Another question. How do you get that toolbar to stay? How do you get that toolbar to stay? What toolbar are we talking about? The bookmarks? This bookmark bar? You Ctrl Shift B will turn it on and Ctrl Shift B will turn it off except when you're on google.com. Then it's always open. You don't have a choice. So here I'm on my calendar. I can close it. Ctrl Shift B is closed. Ctrl Shift B is open. You can also go into settings of Chrome. So the more button next to your avatar, they call it the skinny snowman. You can click there, go to settings, and you can find bookmarks and just leave them on. Okay. I think that answered your question. If not, let me know. What was I showing you? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you went to google.com. Let me do it too. Google.com. There we go. So you see nothing here, right? There's nothing down at the bottom. Nothing under my sleeves or in my brain right now. So what we want to do is while you're signed into Chrome, this only works when you're signed into Chrome, click the new tab button and you might see some little circles of pages where you've gone to a lot and you're wondering why they're there. It's because Google has decided you like these pages and you go to them a lot. So they're going to save them for you in this shortcut area. All right. If you see a shortcut that you don't want to appear here because maybe you have a bookmark somewhere or you just don't want to see it here, you can hover over the one that you want to delete and you can click the skinny snowman, the more actions, the settings, whatever you want to call it, next to it as it comes up, click. And we can edit the shortcut or we can remove it. So I'm going to remove this one. Boom. Okay. Let's say there is a website that I go to a lot and I really do want it to be on this home page, this new tab page because I use it a lot. How do I add it? How do I get that? You're going to click on the add shortcut button.  It's up to you, tdls. And then you're going to type in the URL. Now, you don't have to do it this way. You could actually go to the website and then add it. But I'm going to do it this way. tdls. Make sure you spell it right when you're typing in the URL because otherwise it won't open. You'll get a 404 error. So here's the tdls. So when I click it, it opens for me. I don't have to add a bookmark. That's in the new tab. Whenever you open up a new tab, you'll see these shortcuts. If you're on your Gmail, you might see something that looks like your Amazon shopping cart. It's just Google remembering, oh, you've gone to Amazon a lot at home, I'm sure. Or you go to YouTube a lot. It will save it for you. So you can edit those shortcuts. I could edit this one, the Google Calendar. I can edit it. I can make it anything I want right now. I don't have to have it go to calendar.google.com. And I don't have to call it Google Calendar. I could call it Google Cal. So you can do what you want with these shortcuts, I should call them. Yes, they're kind of like bookmarks, but they're right there in front of you every time you open a new tab. Many questions on so far? I'm looking at the chat. Nope, okay. Moving on. We did that one. We did that one. We're moving fast. Okay, extensions. A lot of people already know what extensions are. They extend the functionality of a product online. So extensions on Chrome let you do more on Chrome. That's it in a nutshell. Extensions on Chrome let you do more on Chrome. So if you're on Chrome and you see this little puzzle piece, that's their logo for an extension. I'm going to click it because a lot of people don't know that they can pin their extensions. They can make them stick on their extensions bar. So all of these to the left of my puzzle piece, my extensions logo, these are all the ones that I use a lot and that I have pinned. And I pin them by, guess, clicking the pin next to an extension. If you don't see a long list of extensions, then you want to click on manage. And then all of your extensions open up and you can enable them or disable them. I'm going to show you right here. Here's QR code generator. I don't really use this one anymore. So I'm going to disable it. I'm not removing it. I'm just disabling it for now because I might have found something better than I have using Google. If you want to remove something because you really don't use it anymore or it's just not floating your boat, you can click remove. All right. So I'm assuming a lot of people have extensions already. That's why I showed you this first before I showed you how to get extensions. All right. What am I going to do? I'm going to open up a new tab. I'm going to leave this extension manager open. I always type it in Chrome extensions in my address bar or my omni box whatever you want to call it. I guess I could bookmark it, but I just type it. And then I can search for an extension. And let's say, yeah, but what? QR code, right? QR code generator. Let's say we're having a conference and I want QR codes for our conference. So I would go to Chrome Web Store, or type Chrome extensions in the omni box, click on extensions when it comes up. It'll come up in the search. And then type what I want to find in the search. Once I do that, I can look at the extensions that are available. I can click to see how many people are using it. This is really important because if only five people are using it and it has a five-star rating, that's not going to make me feel good. If only five people are using it, yeah, a five-star rating, that's great, but five people, no. I'd like to having four stars or better on any extension that I install. The add to Chrome buttons right there, if I read it, if I look at it, if it doesn't look like it has a lot of tech support issues, because you can look at the support box, a limit on quantity of QR codes, is there a limit? Someone's asking, there is no limit at all, it never expires. So, you know, I read through this, I figure out, okay, this sounds all right, so I'm going to add to Chrome. Once you do that, it's going to ask you some questions. You want to add this? And I'm thinking something might have, oh, no, it didn't.  Okay, so if I really like what this extension is doing, I go to my Gmail and I add it there, and I will not be precluded from adding it. Remember, I told you, when you're signed into your home account, your network can't really do anything to your Chrome account, okay, whether you're at home or at work. That's why I have both of them open at the same time. It helps me a lot, especially when I'm sharing between the two accounts. So I've got this added to Chrome. Big surprise, I didn't expect that. I expected it to get the message, but I also see that it's not pinned. So here's the QR code generator, and now I have this grayed out pin next to it. I don't have that many extensions, that's why I don't have a big long list. All I have to do is click it. It turns blue, it's been pinned, so it's always there for me to use. If I have a lot of extensions, and if you're an extension junkie, you might want to unpin some of your extensions. It doesn't mean that you can't use them, it just means that you have to get to them a different way. Okay, they'll be listed here. You just click it and it will open. All right, if it's allowed, if it's allowed by your network. All right, so that's how you add extensions. We've gone over how to manage extensions, open up the puzzle piece, go to manage, boom. You can remove them. You can look at the details, which is basically just opening up Chrome Web Store. You can turn them on and turn them off. Oops, turn them off and turn them on. All right. All righty, questions? Moving on, okay. And again, this is all in the handout. My favorite extensions, I love color pick eye dropper. I use this bad boy a lot. That's why it's first in line and it's pinned. So what I do is when I'm creating drawings or screenshots or something, and I want to know what this exact color is right here, I will turn on the extension and you can see this has turned into a crosshair, right? And I get the color I want. Maybe I wanted the color of the S right there. Or I want the color, the yellow color of the, I want the exact color. So I'm going to click right there on the exact color. Now you notice this right here, this code, it's called a hex code. It's F-B-B-D-O-5. I could write that down or just remember it. That's not going to happen. So what I do is I copy it, Command-C or Control-C, all right? And then I close the color picker. That's the important part. I just hit that X. Now I'm going to go, let's say I've got a handout open and I actually want to create a colored button, the exact color. So here's I've drawn a square. I'm going to go to my paint bucket. I'm going to select custom. I'm not going to try and figure out what yellow it is. I'm going to hit custom. And now I'm going to Command-V or Control-V. I'm going to paste the hex code. And there it is right there. And you notice a little paint eye went right where it should. I'm going to say, okay, that color is the exact color of the share button. I can do this on any website, any website. If I want the exact color of blue that this blue is, I can get it. If I go to the OTAN website and I want the exact color of the bar at the top, I can get it. And then I can create better screenshots that way. So color picker. I love that one. Awesome screenshot record. I made Elisa Takuchi a smee. Almost cry when I showed her this. You can capture an entire page using this extension. So let's say I go to VOA English, Voice of America. I'll just go to Voice of America. Yeah, learning English. That's usually safe. Okay. And this got this. Let's say it's got this big long article that I need for my class. Well, I want it, but I'm going to have to take, what, five screenshots to get it? No. If with this extension, awesome screenshot and screen recorder, you click on it, you make sure you're on the capture tab, and then you click full page. Boom.  And it is capturing the entire page. And then you wait for it to, again, you got to wait for the journals to run. They're running as fast as they can. And sometimes they weren't fed yesterday or this morning, whatever. So, you know, they're eating and running at the same time. So here we go. Here's the page. At this point, I could annotate. I could say, okay, I want you to read this article. So I'm going to make a circle around it. Or I could save it. Or I could download it. Okay. And when I download it, I can sometimes they let you, yeah, I didn't think so. Workspace folder currently saved. They've recently changed. So just, they will give you some space where you can save it in a folder. They'll require you to sign in. But I usually just download from here. I put it on my computer and then I can upload it anywhere I want. All right. So to prove it to you, here is the full page of the screenshot that I just took. Pretty big. Pretty long. All right. And you can do all kinds of stuff with it after you do that. Which leads me to Google draw. I love Google draw. And any of you use Google draw. I want to see a raised hands of anybody that has used Google draw to create their own screenshots. Come on. There's got to be at least one of you out there. Question here, Linda. Oh, go ahead. The last, it just said, was the, Stephanie was that whole page cast an extension. Yes. The whole page was grabbed with an extension called awesome screenshot. Awesome screenshot. Okay. So when you go to the Chrome Web Store, go to extensions and just type in awesome. You might have to type screenshot too. I kind of doubt it. But awesome space screenshot will give you this little icon of the, let me, yeah. And you can't really see that. I can't hold it. Well, let me go to my manage extensions. Here it is. Here's details. Come on. Come on. Come on. Where's the website? You're going to have to trust me. It's, it looks like that. Here we go. I can, I can zoom in. There we go. So it's kind of a rainbow gradient around it and then a little camera thing in it. There you go. Okay. Good. So I'm going to go back to zero. So it looks like Jennifer is the only one that are, do I, there are the more hands raised that has used screenshot or Google draw to create screenshots. Oh, you guys are missing out on so much. I'm closing some tabs. Here we go. Let me go, let me zoom out here because I wanted to see, I want you to see something. Here are all of the screen grabs or images you are going to see in, not all, but most of the images that you're going to see in this handout that I'm going to share with you. So this one right here, does that look familiar? Because it should. I just showed it to you. Here it is. Okay. Here's the image. I just moved it up. I'm moving it down. Why do I do this? Because when I created a screen grab of zoom and I have a, I have it showing up black. Okay. I get all these gray icons, which people can't see. They're not crisp. Right.  It's still everything was kind of grayed out. It was pixelated. It was right. So I said, okay, fine. Mess with me. I'm going to create my own images. Not only that, but when you create your own images, you can make things bigger to make them stand out. So if you really want your students to see where the chat is, you can make it yellow and pop out when you create your own images. So right here, here's the image. And I'm going to zoom in so you can see what I did. And yes, I have a lot of time on my hands. Actually, I don't every one of these this right here. These are words. Okay. I can, I've made this one yellow. I could make it white again because it's mine. I can do what I want with it. Okay. The little green share button. I could change that to blue if I wanted, even though zoom is green. Okay. I can make it a different green if I wanted. So it's a way to make images that will make sense, not only to you, but to your students or the staff that you're trying to show them how to do something. So like, how do I tell how many participants without opening participants? How can I tell how many people are in the room? Well, there's going to be a little number. Well, I don't see it. Okay. It's right here. Okay. I can make it bigger. And then after you create an image, here's the fun part. You can download them as pings so that you can add alt text. So here is an image that we're going to see coming up that has to do with calendars. All right. So I didn't want people to see the email addresses. So what I did was I created a box with some text on top. All right. And I made sure that my canvas, you see what I'm doing? I'm making the canvas bigger and now I'm making it smaller. This is your work area. I'm going to zoom out a little bit more here. So you can see this is your work area. This entire white space is your work area. This, what I'm making bigger and smaller, is your canvas. All right. So I just made the canvas small enough to fit around my image. Then I can go to file, download, ping. And it will go to my desktop. I'm going to call it demo because I think I've already, now I've already got it in there as entitled. All right. And then when I go to insert that image, what did I call it? Demo. Here it is. Open it. Now it's not a lot of different parts. It's just one. It's just one. You also might want to start trying to use drawings when you take screen grabs of other websites because you'll get a crisper image sometimes, sometimes. You have to do a couple of things first. I'm going to get this out of the way. And I'm going to get this out of the way. All right. So this canvas is actually pretty small right here. This is probably about a three by four square. I'm going to make it bigger. And I'm going to make it bigger. And I'm going to make it bigger. And I'm going to make it bigger. I'm going to make it huge. When you take screenshots of a website, I'm going to go to otan.us. Let's say I just want a screen grab of this top part here with the menu. All right. So I'm going to go to my... On a Mac, I have a little screen grab. On a PC, you have your own. I hope you know where that is because I have no idea what to tell you. But on Macs, I can go here and I can figure out, okay, I wanted about this big. Yeah. And I just want this top part. So we're going to do that. And I'm going to scroll over. Yeah, about right there. Okay. And now I'm going to... There's a lot of ways to do it on a Mac. I'm just going to show you what to do once you get that picture in your drawing.  I make my canvas bigger. When you take a picture, when you take a screen grab on your computer, you are actually getting a much bigger... It's snipping on PC. Thank you, Anna. So you get a bigger image than what you think. When you paste the image into a slide deck or a PowerPoint, what the image would... I'm sorry, what the app will do, what the PowerPoint or even Google Slides will do is they will automatically resize it for you so it fits on the slide. I don't want that to happen. I want the image to retain its crispness. So how many times have we taken a screen grab and it looks fine, but then when we're showing it, it's all pixelated. So what you need to do is remember that the screen grabs that you're getting are really big, like when you take a picture with your camera or your phone. They're actually like 36 inches by 50 inches, believe it or not. They're not two by three. So go to the website. I'm going to try this again because I got too much stuff open on my... Here we go. All right, I'm going to make this big. And we're going to go like this. Okay, so I want all of this stuff. And we're going to copy it. And then somehow, however we do it, we're going to paste. There we go. When our canvas is bigger than the picture, that's a good thing. Now I can put the picture up in the top corner and I can resize my canvas by clicking in the lower right corner. Like that. I can even crop it a little bit because whatever my canvas is not on, like this part right here, won't be in my picture. All right. I can add things. I can annotate. I could add... Let's say add a little arrow. There we go. Learn more about OTAN. I can color that. Okay. All right. And now I go to file, download, ping. I get a message. It comes up. Demo two. And I remember what I called it. And then when I go to the slide where I want it to appear, I go to insert, image, upload from computer. Now it will stay.  It's so big. Right. I don't want it that big. That's okay. Watch. We can resize it. We all know how to resize. Not a big deal. And that way my picture, my screen grab, will retain more of its crispness than what it would if I just took a screen grab and then pasted it. Okay. Trust the magic. Let the Google drawings make your pings. JPEG just means that there's going to be a white background. If you have any space on your canvas, it'll just be white behind it. Sometimes you want that to happen. Vector. I've had some success with vectors play with it. I think you can still do scalable vector downloads. So create your own images. If for nothing else, then because you can, you can manipulate it. You can make it yellow if you want. I think I saw a question in the chat. There it is. Okay. Especially help if you have a set of students you want to point out. Yes. If you want to point out where a specific thing is, like I want you all to click on chat. Chat is this big thing, right? Right here.  Look for chats between participants and share. Right. So. All right. Google arts and culture. Oh my God. I love this site. Has anybody used Google arts and culture type? Yes. In the chat, if you have, I didn't tell you to raise your hand. Type yes in the chat. If you have no, if you have not Google arts and culture, somebody says yes. Ah, Jennifer. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I got to know. I got to know. I got to know. Oh my God. You people are you're missing out on some good stuff. Good stuff. So I'm going to type Google arts and culture in my omnibox. Okay. It becomes it's the first link naturally. And I tell you what also what I'm going to do. I'm going to copy this so I can paste it into the handout. Oh, come on. Oh, heck with it. I'm just going to click on it so I get the link. It wouldn't come up here. Come on. Where's my gerbil? There's my gerbil. Okay. Google arts and culture. This is so cool. So today they are celebrating World Wildlife Day. Yesterday this was something else. So what they've done is they've curated a lot of artwork from all over the world from lots of different museums. They've also curated historical lessons and put it all in Google arts and culture. So this is we could have like a five hour workshop on this. I'm going to do a quick, quick overview here. So what I did was I clicked on the hamburger on the, or hot dog, whatever you want to call it, the settings on the far left-hand corner. All right. I like historical events. So I'm going to select that and some cards are going to come up. And we can list them A to Z. All right. I can look for the events that start with the knee. Here we go. Unfortunately, there's been a lot of wars in our, our human existence. So a lot of war stuff comes up, unfortunately. But you, you find what you want. Okay. Maybe the homestead strike. All right. And then you can read about it. If there are any articles about it from newspapers, they'll have that. I don't think that I've never clicked on this before. So I, I don't didn't know what was going to happen. But there is a picture that someone took. We can read more about it. Here's the picture. There we go. The iron and steel industry in southwestern Pennsylvania was never the same. And there we go.  So if you're doing anything about strikes or yes, about women, women's, women in history, you bet. For that, we might go to historical figures. Right. And also along with the A to Z, I want to show you time. Because if you're looking at a specific time period, you can actually use this bar to go back to, wow, 500 BCE? Really? Okay. Let's do that. And there we go. Who knew? That we can go back in time to find these historical figures. So here we go. Maximilian, Severus Alexander, a lot of Romans way back when. But you can go through time. So let's go to something more, a little more recent, maybe trying to pick a safe time period. That's hard. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, here we go. Gandhi, we can read about Gandhi. There's different stories. We can see all the artwork and or pictures that were taken of them. Lots of different stuff here. And you can also add this to favorites. So when you click on favorites, you can add that thing that you found to favorites. So that you can come back to it. So here's a brief history of vaccination. If you wanted to read about that, I bookmarked that about two years ago, actually. Trying to show somebody something. All right. So there was something else here. I went, oh, a coloring book. So within Google Arts and Culture, there are, let's see. I think, I can't remember where I found it last. I'm going to go to experiments. They have a lot of cool experiments here. Here we go. Voices for change. A global world brings to life thousands of voices. So launch some of these experiments. They're really cool. Coloring book used to be right here. I do have a screenshot of it on the slide. It was something that I took a while back. I'm scrolling. I know I'm scrolling fast. I'm sorry. I'm looking. Ah, there it is. Okay. Coloring book right here. I'm going to launch this experiment. They also have puzzle party. This is kind of new. I haven't looked at it, but it works the same way, kind of, as the coloring book. So I'm going to launch this. So I don't know if you recognize this painting or any of these other paintings. These are famous paintings, right? So you look at the painting. Coloring book, huh? So I'm going to click this one, the guy in the field. The Google has created a color palette, and I can choose a color from the color palette and click an area, and it becomes that color. It's kind of like painting by numbers in a way. There's layers here as well. I mean, you can look at the original picture. You can create your own layer or outlines. All right. Here's outlines. Here's the background. Turn them both off. There we go. Outlines. So I want to play. I want that to be light brown. I want this to be dark brown. It's really fun. I mean, if nothing else, if you have kids, this will keep them entertained for a couple of hours. So you look at some of the experiments, though, because some of these, I'm thinking, you can use with your students. There's an emotions map. You know, we're really worried about our students and how they are, even our staff, how they are dealing with all of this, this remoteness. So look at some of these experiments. And I'm sure you're going to find something that you can use. What else we got here? I'm going back to my slides. So, experiments. We've talked about art from all over the world. Use that site. Workspace tips. I've already talked about this. When you're in the club, you have to do, you have to be quite proper and do what the club tells you to do. You have to wear a suit and tie at times. You have to come in the front door, not the back. But when you're in the pub, you can do it down with anything you want, right? So when you're in the pub, you can add extensions, whether they're loud or not, in the club. So, use two accounts if you're at work. That's my advice. It's not against the law. It's not going to be against your district's law. You can do some things in your personal Google account. Then you can with your club account, because especially for adult educators, what you're doing is you're working with adults. Well, you're in a workspace that is geared towards K-12 or you're in a district that uses a K-12 Google. So they're protecting, and if you don't mind, I'm going to go in an accent here. They're protecting the wii-tols, right? So the wii-tols, they're in a basement. They're in a basement and they can't look out and nobody can look in, which is good, because we don't want anybody to look in at our students. We don't want them to get any information. We don't want our students sharing an information. We don't want them to get any information. We don't want our students sharing any information, because they don't know better sometimes. So they're in the basement. It's a nice basement, but they're only allowed to do so much, right? So as teachers with adults, you don't have to worry about that, right? But you're still using that network, so you have to kind of work with those rules, along with working within the pub. In the pub, you can download Dom or anything you want, can't you? Yeah, you can take your password. You can throw it up against the wall and change it anytime. You can't always do that in the network. So use the pub while you're using your network and you'll be able to do a lot more. All right, enough of that. Apply digital skills. Oh my God. What Google has done is it has created this digital skills platform to teach teachers and students how to become digitally, technologically savvy. Apply digital skills. I'm going to just jump right into it. Apply digital skills. It's all one word with Google.com. Apply digital skills with Google.com. It will... I mean, I'm already signed in. I'm already signed in, but I do have to click on the sign-in button and I have to accept that I'm using the ELMS, which is just a... It's an LMS, okay, a learning management system that Google puts in play. So everyone looks at our... Some people have looked at that and gone, Oh, Melinda, can I do this? Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all right. It's okay. So once you're in there and you can create classes and invite your students to do lessons that Google already has curated for you. Lessons on how to use any of the Google digital tools. Like drawings. You want to learn how to use drawings? Click on drawings in the digital tool filter and you will learn how to use drawings. And at the end of the lesson, you will have a finished product. So at the end of make a promotional fire, I'm thinking you're going to have a promotional fire at the end of it. These are all video-based lessons. You are walked through, your students are walked through, how to do something. And within each lesson, you're going to find teaching materials. And within the teaching materials, you're going to find lesson plans and you're going to find rubrics. Look at the lesson plan. If you like what you see, you can save a copy of it to your drive to use with the lesson that you're going to be adding to your applied digital skills class. This class that we could create if we wanted to, we can add it to a class right now. This is not Google classroom. You can add lessons to Google classroom. You can add any of the applied digital skills lessons to Google classroom. It's a little wonky the way it works. It's actually sharing the lesson into the classroom. And that way it's greatable, but it's the entire lesson. It's not each separate little part of the lesson that you're grading. It's the entire thing. So there are one, two, three, four videos here. There's a quiz and then there's some recommended extensions that you can get. If I see a, what is that, a paper clip, then I know that my students can submit work to the teacher in my class. It's really simple and easy to use. I'm not going to go over exactly how to use this. We do have a workshop on it with several different trainers that are qualified to do this training. So if you want more information on applied digital skills, contact me and we'll have a fuss and discuss session. Accounts, your account, I don't know. Most of you already know two factor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to have my phone with me and say, okay, or I'm not doing two factor. It's too much work. No, no, no. Do it, do it. It will protect you. It's not that big of a deal.  Someone's trying to sign into your account and you just say yes, because you know it's you. Or if you look at that and go, wait a minute. I'm not, no, no, click no. And then you'll have to, you'll be prompted to go through a, maybe a password change or it'll tell you exactly where the account is trying to be accessed from. And they, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a shared account. It's fine. So you can find out that way. But within accounts, I don't know if anybody's taking a real good look at this. You have security recommendations. So I've gone to accounts.google.com. You've got it on the club or the pub. The club is your school account. The pub is the at gmail account. When you click on that, it's going to tell you whether or not you have, you know, you've given access to ELMS, is that okay? And if you don't recognize that extension, then you can remove access. Okay, now I recognize all of this stuff, so I just leave it alone. But I do check this every once in a while. Your devices, I have four signed in devices. I do. I'm sorry, I have to check this. Okay, my Mac 2 is this device 30 minutes ago. Okay, that was my laptop. That's why. Okay, so I had four signed in devices today. I didn't expect that. So you can check it out. If you don't recognize the device that's currently signed in, you can kick it out of the pool, out of here. Now, if you have to do anything like that, like kick a device out, or you don't recognize somebody or something, some device that's coming to your account, does anybody know what they should do at that point? Come on, humor me, somebody. You can unmute, or is there still anybody here? Remove it. Remove it. Remove the account? Yes, remove the device, but then what?  Remove the device, and then. Delete the account? No! My God, if I had to delete this account, I would die. No. It's got so much information in it. Change the password. Yes, Jennifer, you get a prize. Not sure what it is. We'll discuss later. Small bills? So check your account every once in a while. And here's the thing about passwords. And I know many of you do this, and I cringe every time I see this. I'm going to go to my Chrome settings. I'm going to go to settings. And I am going to, I'm just going to type for it, because I don't do it, so I don't know where it is, passwords. If you have anything that is auto-filling payment methods, if you have anything that is filling in passwords, those of you that have attended my workshops, you know I'm going to yell at you. Don't do it, folks. I know it makes our lives easier just to click and everything's filled in for us, but you are opening yourself up to a lot of bad juju. And I mean that. Please don't have, and I don't care what the browser is or how safe they say it is, Safari thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread. And we know when nobody's ever going to get into your account, it's happened here at the Sacramento County Office of Education to a network person who knows, who knows things, right? They had Safari save a password to their bank. Now, right away, some of you were probably all, I would never do that. Well, why do you have it save your Amazon? Why do you have it save your work? Right, isn't there stuff there that might be sensitive as well? The answer is yes. If for nothing else, your students emails. Okay, so I'm going to get off my soapbox. No, I'm not. Please don't save passwords to a browser. And I know it's quick and it's easy and it's convenient, right? I know why you do it. I do, but I have yet to save a password to a browser ever in my life. I'm not being good at two shoes on you. I'm just saying I learned a lesson a long time ago but it wasn't me learning it. It was somebody else. So, okay, off my soapbox right now. So, use two factor. Don't save your passwords. Check your account security every once in a while. Calendar, use more than one. When you have a calendar. So, Melinda, question. Go ahead. Don't say, so where can we save passwords? Nowhere.  Or use a reputable password protection app. Last pass is one. Norton has some. I'm trying to think of some others. If anybody has one that they use, please chime in, type it in the chat. So, I know we're required to have passwords that are eight characters long and have an upper and lower case. And this and that, they have to be changed every six months, blah, blah, blah. Is there a place in preferences where we can see if we have any passwords saved? Yes. So, in Chrome, I'm going to go to my pub account because it's not allowed at our Scowy account. You're not allowed to do it. So, I'm going to go to settings because I am allowed to do it on the pub but I don't. I'm going to, so I've gone to, you can do it two ways. You can go to the more button, click on it and then go to settings. Or you can just type chrome colon slash slash settings. I can't put it in the chat because it won't open for you. You have to type it in. All right. So, chrome colon slash slash settings. Now, again, I don't use it. So, I don't, I think it's probably a security and pass and security and privacy. So, I'm just going to type password in the search. Okay. And here I have auto fill. Okay. And there's passwords. So, I'm going to click where it says passwords. And where it says offer to save passwords, you know, I have it turned off. So, it's not asking me, do you want us to save this password? We'll do it for free. It's safe. I promise you. No, I don't want that message. So, I turned it off. When it's gray, it's off. When it's blue, it's on. Okay. Also there, you want to turn off auto sign in. Oh, wouldn't it be much easier if we put in your name for you? Yeah, you know, I need the typing practice. So, I'll go ahead and type my name. So, I turned that off. Check passwords. No, save passwords. Chrome can check your passwords when you save them. So, I don't have any. You might have something when you click on this arrow next to check your passwords. We can also view and manage shade passwords in your Google account or save password. I don't have anything appearing here. So, there you go. I can't really show you beyond that, Sherry. Or oops, not Sherry. Who was that? I know Sherry would never do. We never have done that. Stephanie or Stefan. Whoever it was, I'm trying to look to the chat. All right. All right. Good. It was helpful. Good. All right. On calendar, I'm using my pub again.  I know that's my personal calendar on this account. All right. I have also shared calendars with myself. So, I am, I, we have an account called OTAN where OTAN schedules trainings. And I shared that calendar with my public cell so I could see it. So, I wouldn't have to bounce between calendars. I just, I can just look at it. The OTAN account allowed me scowy tech to see the events. So, I can turn those events on and I can turn those events off by clicking the checkbox next to it. So, you can share your calendar with yourself. I'm going to go back to my work, my work Google. I'm going to open up my work calendar on Google. And you notice OTAN schedule is still here because I saved it, or I shared it with this person too. Or the OTAN, the OTAN account shared it with me, right? So, it appears. So, I can turn the OTAN events on and off, okay? And here is my public, my public. I shared my pub calendar with myself. I also shared my home calendar with myself, which I'm not going to show to you. But on that home calendar, I want to see when my doctor's appointments are, right? So, I can turn that on and see it right here on my work account. So, I have a calendar shared with my work calendar, shared with my SCOE trainer calendar. So, all of my calendars are kind of connected. I can also, or I have also on my personal calendar. I'm just going to show you here on my home calendar. I added a calendar by going to calendar settings. Here we go. I'm going to go to settings, settings, redundant, but that's what you got to do. And you can add a calendar, let's say for doctor's appointments, okay? And then share that with your work calendar. So, you can turn it on and turn it off. I only, you know, I trust myself. So, I give myself edit rights to a calendar. You can, if you don't trust yourself, that's pretty sad. But you can trust anybody you want, okay? You can give them whatever share rights you want on calendar. So, I had this question come up a couple weeks ago. Someone, well, can I share my personal calendar with somebody else? Yeah, you can, but I wouldn't do that. I would create another calendar if there was like a book club that we were part of. I would create another calendar called book club and then share that with them. So, they don't see all of my other stuff, right? So, that's calendar. I think I saw a question come in the chat. Can I merge two calendar events, such as holidays? Yeah, that would be good, wouldn't it, Wilder? No, yeah. So, I'm going to show you here. Let's see, whose account is that? I'm on work, right? So, I took, this is my work account. Now, I'm going to turn on my trainer account. So, you see, TDLS is listed twice. I can't merge those. I could just put it on one calendar. That would be fine. But you can see I'm going to be taking vacation. By the way, folks, I'm going to be out of the office from the 25th through the April 1st. No joke, I really am. So, but yeah, you can't merge events, but you could just list it on one calendar and turn it on and turn it off. So, I tell you, I'm going to click this and I'm going to delete it. So, you see, I still see that I'm on vacation and C is non-contract. So, I still see that I'm on vacation, but that's not on this calendar. Okay. So, that's one way to, I mean, for lack of a better word, it's kind of a merge, but it's just appearing on one calendar and not two. Is there a way for Outlook appointments to sync with Google? Only if your network allows it, Druze. So, there is in settings, you can download your Outlook calendar and then upload it into Google. But the syncing, nope, it won't because your network won't allow it, because that is actually like a pipe between two apps and I'm almost positive that won't be allowed. Sorry, talk to me later though, because I just thought of something, but it would take too long to explain. All right. So, we got calendar covered. Drive apps. This is new and I can show you right here on this account. I'm going to see how new, let's see, how new is it? It's pretty new. All right. So, Google does not have a save button. Everyone knows that, right? They know that shtick. You can hit Ctrl S or Command S if you want, but it'll do absolutely nothing other than make you feel better, right? Well, people started complaining that, well, how do we know it's saved? Well, you have to trust it. Well, we don't want to trust it. We want to know it's saved, right? So, every once in a while, you'll see this cloud next to your folder, or move tool, I should say. You'll see this little cloud. Either a gerbil will run or it'll change colors. When it changes colors, what it's doing is it's saving. So, when I see this little check mark, I know it's done. I'm synced. I'm sunk. It's synced. So, it's saved. And when I click on the document status, I will see that all changes are saved to Google Drive. But here's the new thing that they just added to this little cloud. What if I decide, you know, I'm working on this and trying to get it done, and then I'm going to be out of town and I'm going to El Centro, where the Internet is not going to be all that great. So, I can turn on offline use. Boom. Boom. Turn on offline use for all files. Turn on offline use to access. Okay. And I can turn it on. Boom. And once that is on, that means that offline has been enabled on this device. Now, would I do it on this device? No, because this is my desktop. So, but when I opened up my laptop, I would turn it on so that the documents would be synced to that device so that when I have Internet, everything is fine. It's saving, right? And when I don't have Internet, I can still work on it. And then when the Internet comes back, boom, it syncs. Okay. So, they just added that. Once I turn it on, can you turn it off? Yes, you can, but you have to go back to the apps home. So, I'd go to slides home and I can turn it off there.


everybody welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a homeschool mom gift guide. For the past few weeks I have been sharing all about educational gifts for kids and stocking stuffers and fun homeschool plans but what about us moms? So today I am remediating that and I'm going to share my top 10 gift ideas for the homeschool mom in your life or yourself. Feel free to forward this video if you need to forward it on to somebody for gift giving ideas. So everything that I am going to show you is going to be something that I have absolutely loved that is one of my favorites and that has kind of revolutionized either my homeschool or something that has saved me time. So that's what I'm going to be showing you. These are gifts that I would buy again and again and again for myself and other homeschool moms in my life and I hope that you like them. So the first thing that I have are friction pens. These are by far my favorite you can tell by the amount that are in my hand and it is the one thing that I ask for every single Christmas because I need new ones every year. I literally run the ink out of them. Now friction is a pen that erases and I absolutely love that. As a homeschool mom I tend to either over plan or under plan or plans happen to change especially when I'm trying to follow Emily's lead and so an erasable pen is like seriously life changing and I love them. I like the fine liner ones because they write a little bit thicker than a ballpoint more like a paper mate flare pen but if that is not your jam they do have ballpoint pens. They also have markers. They have all kinds of different ones. I've used them all. I love them all. The fine liner is just my top pick. It is my absolute favorite. The next thing on my gift wish list is a scotch thermal laminator. Now it doesn't have to be scotch. It can be any laminator you want. I like the thermal ones because they are like like once it's done it's done and it's done forever but this one was cheap.  Laminators give you the ability to have extra durability when you're doing things and then they also give you the ability to reuse. So you can use a dry erase marker on anything that you've laminated and it will erase. So if you don't have a laminator you need one because it is amazing for your home school. The next thing on my gift guide is a binding machine. Now this is the pro click. It is my personal favorite. You can see more about the pro click and how to use it in this video right here. My favorite thing about it is that it's easy. It's super simple. Even Emily can do it. You literally just insert a paper and slide that. But the spines that you use with the pro click are like they open like a three ring binder. Again you can see more in that video that I linked but I love that I can change my mind. I love binding things. I love the look of things being bound but I always used to feel like I was wasting my money because I wanted to be able to change things and I couldn't and with the pro click I can. And it also saves me time because I'm home and now I can print laminate bind and do all the things I need to do here and I don't have to drive somewhere or wait for something to come in. I can easily use digital curriculum and I can have it ready like within an hour of purchasing it. So I absolutely love having all of those things in my home for my home school. The next thing for the homeschool mom in your life are books. You literally cannot go wrong with books and there are a ton of really really great ones in the market specifically for home school moms. I will leave a link in the description of all of my favorite home school mom books so that you can go look there. But if you really really want to be extra kind instead of buying her just a book you will give her a gift card to a bookstore. Barnes & Noble, a book similion, a local bookshop wherever it is because that is like the gift that just is tops it all. Usually you're not only just buying her a book that way you are giving her hopefully an afternoon out alone.  So getting that gift card is probably the best gift you can give a homeschool mom. In fact if anybody is wondering what to get me for Christmas that's it. If you are a homeschool mom who is too busy to read a book I have a few solutions for you. The first one is a Kindle Paperwhite. I got this from Mother's Day. It has been one of my absolute favorite things because I have books at my fingertips all the time. It's waterproof so I can have it beachside in the pool in the bath in the rain and you know sidelines of the game. If I finish a book I can instantly get another one. I have read easily three times as much since getting this that I did before getting it because it's just that convenient. And as a busy homeschool mom I absolutely love convenience and the ability to sneak seconds for myself and this allows me to do that. So that is a really really great thing. It's easy to throw in your purse and carry with you anywhere. Now if you are still too busy if the homeschool mommy if you're thinking of the homeschool mom in your life or you as a homeschool mom are like I don't have time for books. I don't have time for a Kindle. Then my next solution is a audible subscription. I love audiobooks, audiobooks or something you can do while you're folding laundry, while you're doing dishes, while you're driving in the car, while you're doing all of those things that we have to do whether we like it or not. And so an audible subscription is perfect because then you can pick whatever book you want to read but the person is still being able to give you a gift. So it's kind of a win-win they're getting to give you a gift and then you can pick whatever it is you want to read. And then if you end up with an audible subscription or even if you don't end up with an audible subscription my next gift is a set of headphones. Now I know earbuds are super popular and a lot of people like them but I don't. They hurt my ears. Most of them are noise cancelling. You can't hear what's going on around you which while that might sound like a fantastic idea as a mom it's really not.  They're like the bone conducting ones. We all actually have a pair of these and we love them. You can hear what's going on in the world around you but you can still hear everything that you're listening to in the headphones and they hold a charge for a good length of time. They're lightweight and not only that but they don't hurt your ears. And so you're not having like sore ears. I didn't have to worry about my daughter using them. I don't have to worry about anybody. They're just really in my opinion the solution that I've looked for for years as far as headphones go.  The next two things that I have are really just because they save time insanity and they help me with my stress. The first of which is a robot vacuum cleaner. Now I don't know which robot vacuum cleaner specifically we have. I think it's a Roomba. It's years old. We've had it for two or three years I think. And when we got it I was originally like eh it's great. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's changed my life. We love it. You should get one. It helps keep the house clean which means that I'm less stressed because the house is clean and the floors are vacuumed and it's just one less thing for me to stress out about. It is time-saving because we are not having to vacuum as frequently. We have two cats so we were vacuuming quite a lot. And so it's saving us time. It's saving our sanity. We're not as stressed out and it's seriously so simple. You can schedule it from your phone. You can set different things. It's just such a fantastic thing. And again if you don't have one you need one. This is actually a gift for mom in my life this year because again I really think that everybody should have a robot vacuum cleaner if you don't have one. And then the last thing on my gift guide is an instant pot. I cannot tell you how many times I have forgotten to fall meat or I just don't have a lot of time to cook something or I don't have the energy or the power to do a lot of dishes. This gives us the ability to cook a fantastic tasting meal for it to be quick for us to not have to pre-think ahead if we didn't because most of the time you can cook frozen food in it and not have a ton of cleanup which kind of just gives us more time in general which is fantastic. So that is another thing that I absolutely think if you don't have you should get or some sort of kitchen gadget that will help save you time if it's not the instant pot something else but definitely something that's going to help save you time in the kitchen because as a homeschool mom meal time can sometimes be like literally the most stressful part of the day. But let's be honest really the one thing that homeschool moms need everywhere is time. It's the one gift that you could give that we would all love so if you can think of a way to give the gift of time whether that looks like you taking her kids to a park for an hour or two a week so that she can lesson plan or whether that looks like you coming over and helping her clean or whatever that might look like if you can figure out a way to give the homeschool mom in your life or to ask for if you are the homeschool mom the gift of time that is really the one thing that we all need more of so that is probably the top thing on all of our wish list. And now I would love to know if you're a homeschool mom and you are watching this video what is on your wish list this year what is the number one thing that you want for Christmas. Please leave it in a comment down below so that we can all see it and so that we can build a resource for everybody looking for ideas for what to get the homeschool mom in their life.


to Davis Media Access. We're here in the studio for another episode of The City Considerers and I'm pleased to welcome back Davis City Council member Dan Carson. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. It's been a couple months I think since we've gotten together and spoken and I was taking note that it July 11th will be a year since you were sworn in for your first term as City Council member. So let's have a little chat about that year. It's been an eventful year in our community. We've had some tragic losses. We've had some big challenges. We've had some success. So checking in with you, how's it feeling from from your seat? I'm really enjoying this. It's it's challenging. I'm learning new things every day but I feel like we're making progress on the big issues that we talked about in the campaign that we really focused on and there are all these wonderful side trips of issues in Davis that I didn't even know existed before I ran. Right.  What's the biggest takeaway so far if you can encapsulate that? I think that as long as we keep working with each other closely as we have been we can make real progress. It may involve compromise amongst our points of view. This is a really congenial and hardworking group of council members and we've got a great working relationship with our city manager and our city staff. We don't count to five when we vote on every issue but I think anybody watching us up on the dice there can see us working listening to each other listening to the public that comes to testify before us trying to come to meaningful decisions that will move us ahead and I think we've done that on fiscal issues, housing, economic development and a number of others. So you've just started a laundry list there. I mean this year we've had a downtown planning process. We've had endless debates about parking. Should it be paid? Should it not be paid? We've had a lot of concern about road improvements in various areas of the town and there's just been a lot going on. Last time you were here we talked a bit about economic development I believe and you were getting ready to move into some conversations with or the council was with the university. So let's talk about some of the progress there because I think where we are as as town and gown is pretty different than where we were a couple of years ago. Absolutely and that's a huge breakthrough I think for our joint community. In fact we now have a body called a two by two by two that includes two council members, two high-level members of the campus administration and two county supervisors. We have an agenda, we have a set of obligations to each other, we have a binding and enforceable agreement. The campus has started the process of building 5,000 beds for students on campus that goes along with 4,000 beds off campus that we're building. They're providing us money to help build transportation improvements and probably the most important thing is we have an organized process for talking to each other and resolving the really big issues that we have in this community. Now lack of housing I know was kind of the the the major issue there and as you said it's being addressed on multiple fronts now. What were some of the other sticking points or some of the other places where we might need to come to better agreement? Well we wanted in general to have a sense and an understanding that that the campus would take ownership of the impacts on our community. On housing was was a very large one and probably the large one but also also fiscal matters. So for example from now on it's now written into this agreement that when they have master agreements where they take over apartment complexes those stay on the property tax rolls and help provide this community not just the city but the county and the schools the money they need to provide the services that go along with either additional students or faculty. That's just one of many examples. Another is we're going in together to rebuild the bike path along Russell that's kind of to the west of 113. Don't ride it if you wear dentures it's really bad. It's pretty bad. All right so we talked a little bit about bike travel. Let's touch on parking. I feel like we have to do that. What do you have to say about parking? It's really been a hot topic. Absolutely and you know we're trying to figure out the future of our downtown and you referenced that downtown plan sure we'll be working on that we'll be working on well into the next year. How we manage cars when I knocked on doors as a candidate over and over and over I heard from folks at the door saying look I have a real trouble parking downtown. How are you gonna fix this? Parking meters on the street did not go over. There was a strong visceral reaction to that. We listened and we compromised and we we are providing additional paid parking in strategic locations and parking lots downtown and that's nothing new. We've already had a paid parking lot in particular down by the train station we think it's really important because we know there's a share of the parking there that is taken up by folks who drive in from the Sacramento region come across the causeway take our parking spots and jump on the M track station trains from there. Because we don't charge for it right? Right. It's open season those spots are filled up on weekdays by 6 a.m. we want to take that back as a resource for us and that will involve in part providing parking charges and our plan is to include discounts for our local folks who want to drive down there and take the train. Now parking was just one piece of the overall downtown planning process I referenced so let's talk about that for a minute. There was a whole design charrette process. There was a a lot of opportunities for public input and where do we stand with that now? What's been your role with that? Sure. I'm one of two city council liaisons to our downtown planning advisory commission. I go to all the meetings I can. I go to a lot of meetings so I don't make everyone but I do what I can and really the cornerstone of that plan to me is economic development. We're going to go through a process where people will know what they can do with their property. It's form based code what's the shape and feel and height that's allowed and if there's a historical resource that needs to be protected we'll draw a line around that and say not here but creating certainty for people to invest is one of the keys we think to spurring additional investment in downtown and we've had some you know good first steps. Mars has set up a research center in our downtown so high income jobs supported going out to our local restaurants. That's at fifth and G right? That's right. We think it's a model for other things that we could make happen. Okay. I wasn't sure I was going to ask you about this as a member of the former broadband advisory task force. Everything is fair game. But everything is fair game. So we the the broadband task force closed out its work a few weeks ago last month and there was a council meeting in which you had written an op-ed with concern really about the fiscal impact of the project. So I wanted to give you an opportunity to just say a few more words about that. I know the vote was really was in favor of supporting the the task force recommendation that more research is needed and so if you could maybe talk about if there's any movement there there may not be at this point in the council year. Right now we just made our decision there to move forward do some additional work trying to look at the situation. The concern I raised was really what came out of two very good consultant reports that were produced under the auspices of the broadband task force itself. And and it raised really serious concerns about the idea of our having a hundred and thirty six million dollar bond issue a huge significant tax subsidies at a time when just in the last year this committee failed to pass a parcel tax measure to fix our streets and roads. So it's a difficult path. I think there are there is a path forward. What we all want is competition. We don't want a monopoly by AT&T and Comcast. We want to bring in new partners and leverage the assets that the city has there and in other respects to see if we can create more competition create higher higher levels of service. And it is an economic development tool. It's just we don't my personal view is it's going to be very challenging to try to do this with a huge subsidy from the taxpayers. I just don't think they'll support that. OK. And one of your concerns was you referenced a large funding gap that the city has. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. When I previously was on the finance and budget commission and its chair with the work of some very good members of our commission, we produced 20 year projections with also with the help of city staff that showed that we've got not a deficit or imminent bankruptcy, but in the long term we lack the resources to pay all of our personnel costs like pensions and retiree health care. We lack all the money we need to keep our streets and roads and parks and city buildings up to snuff. We're not talking about the money to build new 50 meter pools. We're talking about just keeping roads at an appropriate level of service over time. And we don't we have work to do. We're turning over every rock every day at city hall looking for strategies that either generate additional revenue or constrained costs. We've had some success, but we have a lot more work to do there and we're not out of the woods. So taking on a huge new financial liability would be very worrisome. Now we have an election coming up next March and are we going to be seeing, I can't remember if we're going to be seeing parcel tax renewal in that in that particular if that's later in the year in 2020. So in terms of what the school district does with the parcel tax, we've yet to hear from them what their timing is intended to be. What the city will have is an effort renewal of its one cent sales tax that we added on. And it's a huge issue for our city. It's about nine million in a typical year of about $60 million general fund. And that general fund is what supports fire, police, parks, senior center. The services that we really treasure around this place. The two-year budget we just adopted this last week assumes renewal of the tax measure at its current level. That issue will start to be discussed by our council even next month. The whole the whole issue of taxation is very complex as chair of the arts alliance. I've learned a bit about the transient occupancy tax and how among many other things it funds some of our public art projects. So so thank you voters for that. Thank you council for that. But there's just a lot of different ways in which we as a community have chosen to tax ourselves. Whether we'll continue to want to do that I think is is a valid question right now. And the hotel tax is a really great example where the foresight of the park city council I whom I advised as a commissioner but they were the folks up there voting and making the decisions. They decided to to provide approval for a couple of new extended stay hotels. The one on on down by the target off of mace boulevard is very close to completion now and we know that's going to generate summer in the realm of five to six hundred thousand dollars a year for the city year after year to pay for all those those good things that we need. Yeah so I know we're getting down to our last couple of minutes. What do you think is lies in the year ahead for you? Any particular priorities you're looking forward to tackling? Well first of all that you mentioned measure oh that's that's a really important one and I'm I'm anticipating I'm going to play a significant role in helping to pull together the campaign to renew that measure next March. That downtown plan we're going to be reaching critical decisions in around August we expect a draft of that plan to come forward. Okay. We'll have a period for all of our community to weigh in and tell us what they think about it and then we'll go through an environmental process and then we now just know that there'll be a proposal for an innovation center at the east end of town and we haven't seen the details it's it they've dusted off a proposal that was being considered at City Hall for a couple of years. Right. And so we're very interested in seeing the details what they have in mind and again we're really trying to encourage folks in our community to weigh in with the applicants directly but also with our city staff and give us their ideas on what should that look like. Yeah. What should our goals be for any project like that and then we'll we'll see if it's a good project or bad. I'm I'm optimistic it fills a need we really need to keep these smart one-hills coming out of UC Davis here and and helping to produce revenue for the city and job. And you're right that idea of an innovation center has been around for I don't even know how long but I feel like I I talked to people 15 years ago about it so. I know you you are seeing a number of really important issues kind of coming to a head. Yeah. We are really trying to move forward in the city on the big decisions. We're not afraid to take on parking meters or we you know we worked last week to try to rearrange our budget a bit to put more money into fixing our streets and roads with the money we have. We know there's more we need to do but we're we're we're taking those head on and we're not running away from it. Homeless housing you name it I think you can look at a council that has taken these issues seriously they're all work in progress but we're we're really working on it. We didn't even get to touching on homelessness because there has been there been a number of community forms and a number of developments on that front so I'm going to have to have you back another time so we can tackle that. But meantime I want to thank you for taking the time as always to come in and chat and tell people the best way to reach you if you would. Sure. It's my email address is the best way to reach me and that's dcarson at cityofdavis.org. Okay and I've learned that you're pretty responsive so thank you for that. All right you've been watching the city considers here at Davis Media Access you can find episodes online through davismedia.org you can also catch them on DCTV channel 15 on the Comcast channel and on our YouTube channel under Davis Media Access. Thanks so much for tuning in and check out the rest of the programming while you're there.


Brainerd unbelievable season on the tennis court so far, 16-1 today they played out of section against Foley. In first singles, Brittany Fletcher for Brainerd able to hit the cross court smash for the winner, but she would fall in two sets, 6-4, 7-6. First doubles went three sets here, we see Heidi Jacobson up front with a nice play for Brainerd to force the out by Foley, but Brainerd loses that set in a tight one. Second doubles now, great serve from JC Hinrichs, then Lily Jones up front puts the point away as the Warriors take this one in three sets, however wouldn't be enough as Foley able to take the win 5-2. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


So here's some examples of some basic techniques. So in Mantis, there's a kick that's very long distance, right? Very long distance. I can reach them all the way from here. But in Wing Chun, the kick is very short. Because I'm just doing... I'm just kicking the knee. I'm just kicking the groin. Very little movement in Wing Chun. The application is completely different.