YouTube "Videos Not Aproved"

You may have noticed lately that if you access YouTube on your school account, you will now see a blue bar with a message that reads "Video not approved for mjbha.org" and a white "Approve" button.

What's going on?

A teacher tried to leave an educational video for students to watch in her absence, but the students could not access it.

It turns out that the newly reconfigured blocking software is keeping an awful lot of useful videos out of our students' hands.

IT has now set it up so that if you wish to share a video on, say, Google Classroom, you can approve the video for school use. When you share the link with the students now, they will be able to open the video in school.

How to share videos

If you need a refresher on how to share videos, I'll run through the easiest method.

Once you've clicked "Approved," click on the curved arrow that says Share under the video. Copy the URL (https://youtu.be/etc.) that appears in the box beneath.

Go into Classroom and set up a post.  Click the Add Link symbol  (orange arrow in the picture) and paste that into the Add Link pop-up box in Classroom and click Add Link (yellow arrow) and then hit Post.

Uploading files from computer to Google Drive

A quick tutorial on how to upload files from a computer to your Google Drive.

Open Chrome and go to Google Drive (drive.google.com). Make sure you are signed in to your Google account. (Reminder - your school Google Drives are virtually (ha!) bottomless, so you'll probably never run out of room.)

Click on the "New" button in the upper left.

The click on either "File Upload" (if you just wish to upload a file, or a few select files) or "Folder Upload" (if you want to upload an entire folder, or several folders).

Then a Windows Explorer window (the thing that looks like a manila file folder) will open. Navigate to the folder(s) you want, and then click "Open."

QUICK REMINDER: You can choose multiple files by holding the Ctrl key as you click each one with your mouse. If you want to choose a group of files, you can hold the Shift key, click the first file, and while still holding the Shift key, click the last file in the group; all the files in between will now be highlighted / chosen.

Coolsymbol.com - fun stuff (and a very useful tool for Hebrew)

Check out coolsymbol.com. It is full of fun symbols to dress up your docs, neat text effects and all other sorts of goodies.

Just look at all the different star symbols to use in place of a boring asterisk:

Just click on anything and it loads into your clipboard.

It has so much more than the Insert Special Character in Google Docs. 

But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the home page, there's something very useful for Google Doc workers in Hebrew or Arabic or any other Right to Left language: Other Special Non-Printing Characters. [UPDATE: This can be done manually on Chromebooks. See below.]

The one we want is the very last one - Right-To-Left Mark.

If you've ever put a punctuation mark after a Hebrew word in Google docs (like a single quote, a/k/a גרש, a/k/a tchuptchik) you know the frustration of having it go to the other end of the sentence.

Click the Click to Copy box and after you type the גרש, hit ctrl+v and the mark will magically jump back to where it belongs.

(This is one of the many reasons I still write my multilingual English/Hebrew documents in Word rather than Google Docs; Word keeps going right to left until you switch back to English.)

UPDATE: Manual method for Chromebooks only.

After you type the גרש and it goes to the wrong side, switch to English and hit Ctrl+Shift+U. You'll see an underlined u. Type 200F and hit enter. This will insert a RLM (Right-to-Left Mark)
I didn't say it was easy, just manual.

Hebrew Formatting from Word to Docs

If you have ever tried to save a multilingual Word Doc mixing right-to-left and left-to-right text as a Google Doc, you know that the formatting can often get messed up in the transition.

(Full confession: I still write most of my tests in Word. It still handles Hebrew better than Docs.)

However, if you paste the Word doc into a blank Google Doc, the proper formatting is preserved.

The one thing that gets changed is - if you use automatic numbering in Word, the numbers will get pasted into Docs as regular text, not automatic updating numbers. Not a deal-breaker for me. The upside outweighs the downside.

Search within folders in Google Drive

Sometimes something new is right in front of you and you don't pick up on the difference. Once when I was a kid, my father shaved off his mustache and I didn't notice it.

Apparently, for the last year, there's been a new feature in Google Drive; one, in fact, that I always felt was a major missing feature that rendered Google Drive less than user-friendly. You can now (now being either January 2018, or this morning, when I finally noticed it) search within folders on Google Drive.

This is important. Although I keep my Drive fairly neat, with nested folders within folders, often I can't remember in which folder a crucial file is hiding.

Right click on the folder in Google Drive online. One of your options is "search within _____ "