I had this idea on my drive to school this morning (most of my great ideas spawn while I am driving) to start blogging once a week about a tool to use for your classroom or beyond. This will be the first post and just so everyone knows each week I may present something very basic or very difficult depending on my mood. I am going to start with something pretty basic. The tech tool of this week is Gmail Chat.
I started using gmail sometime in college just as a separate personal account from my college account. Once I started teaching I was still using gmail, but the school I was at was not using gmail, until my second year. Once our school went Google, I became borderline obsessed with the possibilities. One of the small tools I use on a daily basis is gmail chat. When you open up gmail, on the left hand side of the window under the labels you have (inbox, starred, spam, trash, etc.) there will be an option to chat. You may have to add specific people by email or from your contacts to chat with them. By hovering over someones name you have options, but if you simply click on a person's name you can chat with them.
The nice part about this chat feature is it lets you know who is available and who is unavailable based on the little circle or video camera by their name. If the color is green, then they are available, if it's orange they have been inactive for a while. If it is red, then they are busy. You can change your color to let people know your availability as well. I use this feature if I need to send just a quick message that really doesn't require much length. It is less annoying than receiving an entire email devoted to maybe one question or comment. You can copy and paste links to YouTube videos and pictures and they will embed into the chat itself which is a nice feature. When chatting with someone everything you type will be saved in an email label called chats which is somewhere under "Inbox". You can change this by clicking "more" when you are in the chat window and clicking "go off the record". Another great option is inviting multiple people to chat at once, you can do this by clicking the little guy with a plus sign and typing in people's names or emails.
The main reason I use this feature/tool is the convenience. All too often I get emails that are annoying to open up and read and then eventually delete because they were useless little bits of information that could have been communicated so much easier through a chat. If you have Google+ the chat option is the same, so if you are on gmail and google+ the chat will pop up in both locations. For teachers this is especially great if you have students that are staying late in your class, you can simply chat with the teacher whose class they will be late to just to communicate quickly. I don't like it when my phone rings, especially in the middle of class, so the chat feature is a great alternative to communicate quick information.
Here is a link to a help page for this tool: https://support.google.com/chat/answer/161880?hl=en&ref_topic=2386086
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