Reflection on GAFE Training with New Teachers

I spent four hours today demonstrating some of the features of GAFE accounts. I always must guard against the assumption that teachers automatically know Google's interface. Today's crop of teachers were rather familiar, but their questions always are a good reminder to stick to the basics. In addition, they keep me on my toes and aid me in coming across hidden features I had forgotten. One trick they found very useful was saving email addresses in a mail message to a group. I instructed them to type all the names of the members of their departments as mail recipients. Our directory automatically places emails in after typing the person's name. After that, they clicked on the "To" button to open the directory. The names they typed appeared on the bottom and below the names is the "Save as a Group" button. Clicking on that allows them to save those email addresses as a group. Once the group is created, you can send messages to those recipients just by typing the name of the group in the "To" row of an email message.