In this video I just want to talk about how you can sync Gmail with iAnnotate.
In a couple of previous videos on electronic grading, I've talked about how
you can use Dropbox instead of Gmail, but if you think that Gmail is more secure,
and I think you may be right about that, then you'll want to know how to set up
Gmail effectively so that it syncs beautifully with iAnnotate. Now the
critical component for this is to be able to request files, and to do that
you'll want to use Google Forms. So if you're in your email inbox, and you go to
Google Apps, then if you have an institutional account you likely have
access to the forms option. If you scroll down far enough and click on that, you're
going to go to forms. This is where you can create basically a file request that
you can send to students. And that's the the critical component here. So let's set
one up here. We'll just start with a blank form and we'll give it a title
here. We'll call this "grading for" ... or "Upload your assignment" ... whatever you want
to call it ... "for English 101." There we go. Then you can add a description, and I'll
leave that to you. Then click on untitled question, and change it from multiple
choice to file upload. Okay, so now people can upload their files. If we click on
continue we can finish this off and we can change a few settings here. Now, you
don't really have to put a question in here, but you may want to allow only
specific file types. So if we change this, maybe we only want documents and PDFs.
And maybe we want to up the maximum number of files just in case people need
to submit multiple files. Then you can change a few other things as well. You
can make this a required part. Whatever you want to do. Okay, so we have our
basic form here. You can click on "responses" to
change some settings as well -- if you want to create spreadsheets with responses, if
you want to be notified when, you know, somebody uploads an assignment, whatever
that may be. You can also click in the top left corner and you can see here now
that our file name is going to show up. So this is the name for our form.
If you go to the right you can see that we can actually customize the theme, and
if you want to make it look pretty you can change the color, you can add a
picture, you can do all sorts of things. You can also preview, so if we just
close the theme options, you can preview this. I'm not going to click on this, but
you can try it out yourself. And then over here with the settings you can do a
bunch of different things. Just be aware of the different options.
Let's change that. The last thing and the critical thing is this send option here.
Once you're ready to send it, you can email the link directly to your students,
let's say, or other people, or you can click here, and you can just take the
link or a shorter version of it and then you can send it from somewhere else,
let's say. I, for instance, use Moodle, so that's a platform for communicating with
students, and I could just take this link and write a message via Moodle ... send
students the link and then they can use it to upload their
assignment. Now the last thing I'll mention here is that as soon as you
create one of these forms it also automatically creates a folder that goes
with it in your Google Drive. And so all that you have to do at the end then is
basically just go into iAnnotate and sync with Google Drive and it will
move that folder over and then you have direct access from inside
iAnnotate to your Google Drive folder. In that way you can have as seamless
a way of using Gmail as you can with Dropbox. I hope that helps. Thanks for
watching.