Most of us find ourselves multitasking at some point and are possibly even proud of our multitasking skills. Here is one game that was created by Alan Cyment with collaboration from Tobias Mayer and introduced to me by Gerry Kirk and Yves Hanoulle at SDEC11 that allows you to simulate the costs of task switching. Ive since used it elsewhere and the results were quite effective for shaking the multi-tasking misconceptions.

(Note: Alan added a comment to this blog and Ive incorporated some of his new ideas and changes - thanks Alan!)

The Game

Materials needed

• 6-20 people (note - if you have more than this, just split into multiple groups. In theory you can handle as many people as you have space for)
• One facilitator
• One stop watch
• White board / Easel or equivalent to record a few scores.

Suggested questions to ask before the game

• Who values multitasking?
• How many projects are you working on right now?
• Can we juggle tasks well?
• Who is great at multitasking?

Practice / Warm-up

1. Have each person pair up and then line up in two lines facing each other like this:
A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 (A1 faces B1, A2 faces B2, etc)
B1 B2 B3 B4 B5
• If you have an uneven number, you can ask one person to be your time keeper. If you have some sceptics or others who don’t want to participate, you can ask them to be observers ;). However, you need at least 3 pairs and more is better.
2. Have each pair practice the Hands activity as below
3. Now switch pairs by having everyone in line A move one spot. A5 will have to move all the way to A1. Your line should now look like this:
  A5 A1 A2 A3 A4 (A5 is paired with B1, etc) 
  B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 
4. Have each new pair practice the Numbers activity below
5. Now switch pairs again by having everyone in line A move one spot. You should now look like this:
  A4 A5 A1 A2 A3
  B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 
6. Have each new pair practice the Song activity below

Performing the game

1. This game will be performed in two rounds
2. Round One:
• You as the project manager will tell the teams which activity (project) to work on.
• You will bark out instructions ("Shout-Driven Develolpment") and they are expected to switch tasks on your command. For each activity they need to switch to perform the activity with the pair they practiced that activity with. (This will involve a lot of movement.)
• When each pair resumes an activity that they have already started they must pick up where they previously left off.
• Your time keeper should record the time when the whole team (all pairs) have finished each activity.
• Keep asking the team to task switch every 2-10 seconds (be random!) until all pairs have completed the activities.
• Record the completed time for each activity.
3. Round Two:
• You as the project manager will tell them the priority of the activities (projects). You will ask them to complete Hands first, Numbers second, and Song third. You ask them to complete each activity (project) before starting the next.
• Your time keeper should record the time when the whole team (all pairs) have finished each activity.
• Record the completed time for each activity
4. Your results should look similar to the results in the image below. Note: we played this game twice after adding more people - the purple numbers are the results of the second game.

Additional Tips and or Alterations

Alan Cyment commented on this blog (see below) with some alterations and changes that he is using. Take a look at some of these additional tips and ideas:

• Have the group decide how to rotate partners instead of defining the rotation for them.
• Run the sequential round first and then the multitasking round.
• Have the group choose their own song instead of Happy Birthday.
• For larger groups, ask them to put their hands up when they complete each project. This will help the time keeper to understand when each project is completed amidst the chaos.
• Instead of acting as the project manager, act as the product owner who represents three different customers/stakeholders.

Questions:

• What did you think of the game? 
• What are some conclusions you can draw about how you are currently working? 
• Notice that in the second attempt you completed all three tasks before you completed the first one in the multi-tasking round. What do you think about that? 
• For the two rounds, notice your time to market.
• How different was the quality of your product in round one and two?
• What did you notice about your stress level in round one and two?
• What does this game teach us about sustainable pace?
• Describe your discipline level in each round. How much did your team cheat or ignore the managers orders?
• How does that affect how you will work? 
• What happens when you task switch? 
• What are the costs to juggling tasks? 
• How can we change the way we work to take advantage of this? 
• What are the barriers to making this happen? 
• How can you respond to someone who is asking you to switch to another task or to split yourself between two or more projects?

The Activities:

Hands:

• Clap your own hands / Clap your both of your partner’s hands 
• Clap your own hands / Clap your partner’s right hand 
• Clap your own hands / Clap your partner’s left hand 
• Clap your own hands / Clap your right hand to your left foot 
• Clap your own hands / Clap your left hand to your right foot 
• Repeat once

Numbers:

• First person holds up 1 finger / second person claps once 
• First person holds up 2 fingers / second person claps twice (up to five) 
• Then switch roles and repeat once

Song

Sing/say the Happy Birthday song alternating each word. One person says the first word, your partner says the second, you say the third, etc:

• Happy birthday to you 
• Happy birthday to you 
• Happy birthday dear <name> 
• Happy birthday to you 
• Repeat once

Additional Resources:

Stats

From QSM 1, Systems Thinking (Dorset House, 1992). Jerry Weinberg:

• # of tasks = 1 - Time spent on task = 100% 
• # of tasks = 2 - Time spent on task = 40% 
• # of tasks = 3 - Time spent on task = 20% 
• # of tasks = 4 - Time spent on task = 10% 
• # of tasks = 5 - Time spent on task = 5% 
• # of tasks = more than 5 - Time spent on task = random.

Links on Multi-tasking

• Emails ‘hurt IQ more than pot’ 
• Leanblog podcast featuring Dave Crenshaw - author of “The Myth of Multitasking” - http://www.leanblog.org/2010/10/podcast-100-dave-crenshaw-the-myth-of-multitasking/
• The Myth of Multiasking - by Christine Rosen
• A blog with some cited research and links to short videos
• Three Myths and Three Tips - article by Johanna Rothman
• Brain Research - The Myth of Multiasking - video.
• Why Limit Your WIP: A 10 part series - Jim Benson.

Links on combatting multi-tasking

• Questions to ask to find out the urgency and importance from JB Rainsberger:
• What’s the good business reason to do this? (One of my favourites) 
• Why should I do this specifically today? 
• What would be the consequence of not doing this?
• Article by Johanna Rothman on how to say no
• Some articles by Esther Derby on this topic: 
• Yes. No. Negotiate
• Breakthrough Thinking on Worker Productivity 
• 7 Things Highly Productive People Do

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Our Google Apps Hackathon is just over 1 week away. We put together a site where you can find directions, announcements, and other resources to help you get started. The hackathon is open to all developers interested in integrating with Google Apps, whether or you’re an ISV looking to sell your app in the Google Apps Marketplace, a system integrator or reseller, or use Google Apps for your own business.

Tentative Agenda:
9:45 AM - 10:15 AM : Registration
10:15 AM - 11:00 AM : Opening remarks & overview of Google Apps & Google Apps Marketplace
11:00 AM - 4:00 PM : Open time for coding, asking questions
4:00 - 5:00 PM : Demos & Presentations from attendees
5:00 PM : Closing remarks

Well also be running a series of short presentations and discussions on various topics starting at 11:00 AM for those interested. Planned topics include:

• Marketplace APIs
• OpenID & OAuth
• Gmail contextual gadgets
• Administrative APIs
• Docs APIs
• Calendar APIs
• Contacts APIs

There will be plenty of time to try out APIs, ask questions, and get hands-on help from members of the Google team and other local developers. Bring your laptops and come hang out at Google. Lunch and snacks will be served.

When: Tuesday, August 24th from 10AM to 5PM.
Where: Google Campus: 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043.

If you haven’t yet signed up and would like to attend, you can register here.

Posted by Steven Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace Team

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We recently posted some best practices for working with recurring events in Google Calendar API v3. In this blog post we’ll highlight another improved area in the v3 API: event reminders.

Reminders

Google Calendar API v3 offers developers flexible control over event reminders, including per-calendar default settings and custom overrides for individual events.

The user’s default reminders for events on a given calendar can be found in the corresponding entry in the Calendar List collection. The Calendar List collection acts a bit like a list of bookmarks, containing entries for the calendars that the user owns or has looked at in the past (it corresponds to the content of the "My Calendars" and "Other Calendars" list on the bottom left in the Web version of Google Calendar). Each entry is annotated with user-specific settings for the individual calendar, such as the preferred color in the UI and the default reminders.

Google Calendar currently supports three ways of reminding its users of events: "popup", prompting a message directly in the browser, mobile phone or desktop client, as well as "email" and "sms" for messages sent through the respective channels. To change the defaults, update the Calendar List entry and include the reminder method and how many minutes in advance the user should be alerted. In the following example, we set an email reminder to be sent 60 minutes before an event, and a popup reminder 10 minutes before.

{
 "summary": "Work Calendar",
 ...
 "defaultReminders": [
   {
     "method": "email",
     "minutes": 60
   },
   {
     "method": "popup",
     "minutes": 10
   }
 ]
}

A Calendar List entry with title and default reminders.

The default reminders will be applied to all existing and future events on this calendar, provided they don’t have custom reminders set already. In contrast to earlier versions of the API, newly created events will also have reminders set by default.

Sometimes, there are events that we want a special reminder for, or none at all. To override the defaults for a specific event, switch the useDefault flag in the reminders section to false, and include a set of custom reminders, or leave the list empty. When you define a set of override reminders for a recurring series, they are automatically applied to each of its occurrences, unless they have been overridden explicitly. Like the default reminders on the calendar, these are personal reminders for the user that is logged in, and will not influence the settings others might have for the same calendar or event. Here is an example that overrides the default reminders with a 15 minute SMS reminder for that specific event.

{
 "summary": "API Office Hours",
 ...
 "reminders": {
   "useDefault": false,
   "overrides": [
     {
       "method": "sms",
       "minutes": 15
     }
   ]
 }
}

An event representation with title and reminder overrides.

The defaults for the given calendar are included at the top of any event listing result. This way, reminder settings for all events in the result can be determined by the client without having to make the additional API call to the corresponding entry in the Calendar List collection.

In this post and an earlier post about best practices with recurring events, we have covered some improved areas of the latest version of the Google Calendar API. Have a look at the migration guide for a more complete view of other changes we made in the new version, and let us know what you think.

If you have any questions about handling reminders or other features of the new Calendar API, post them on the Calendar API forum.

Peter Lundblad   profile Peter joined Google in 2006. Hes been leading the Calendar API team for the last 2 years. Hes previously worked on video uploads for YouTube.

Fabian Schlup   profile Fabian is a Software Engineer at Google in Zürich, working on Calendar and Tasks, with a focus on APIs.

Editor’s Note: Stephanie Obodda oversees Computer Training and Communications for Brown Universitys central IT department. She was on the project team that helped Brown "go Google" in 2010.

In our 170-person IT department at Brown University, we had a less-than-ideal way of sharing sick/vacation time among coworkers: sending an email to a Listserv. This was inefficient - mails were not written in a standard format, so it was difficult to determine who would be out on a certain date. Some teams would notify each other of time off by sending personal invites to their vacation events, but this resulted in cluttered calendars.

The Solution

Since most of my coworkers were already creating events on their calendar to indicate their vacations, a calendar-based solution seemed most convenient. The script I wrote simply requires them to perform one additional step: when creating their vacation event, they invite a specific email address as a guest.



The script:

• Aggregates events from the invited ‘out’ calendar, keeping only the relevant information: person, date, and type of event (from keywords like vacation, sick/doctor, or conference)
• Creates a single daily event on another calendar with the day’s “who is out” list. We can overlay this calendar onto our own without having an overwhelming amount of individual “out” events.
• Each morning around 9am, the daily Out list is automatically posted on a Google Site.

A single daily event on a shared calendar contains the list of who is out that day.
Code snippet - function which determines the type of event based on keywords in the event title. The keywords were chosen with the help of our HR Manager and several co-workers.

Something that streamlined the process was using up a dedicated email address for the calendar and script. This allows people to invite a simple, easy-to-remember email address to their vacation events and gave us a neutral place to store the script (not a personal account).

One issue I ran into while writing the script was that the user who created the event wasnt always the person who was out of the office because assistants often put these events on calendars. I received great feedback from the Apps Script forum. This is essential because we do delegated calendaring, and assistants put vacation events on the calendars they manage.

I’m not employed as a programmer - I’m a trainer with some self-taught ActionScript, JavaScript and PHP skills, and I found it very easy to wrap my head around Google Apps Script.

Posted by Stephanie Obodda, Brown University

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Hello Austin! We had such a blast with our previous Apps Script hackathons in Washington DC, Mountain View, Chicago and NYC that we’re spreading the joy to our friends in Austin. If you’re an Austin-based developer looking to learn more about Google Apps Script, meet the Apps Script team or just to meet other like-minded developers and build cool things, don’t miss out on this event! We will be holding a hackathon on Thursday, September 13, 2012 between the hours of 2-8pm Central Time at our Austin, TX office.

We’ll be covering the basics of Apps Script for new developers as well as going over a brief overview of all the new features we’ve launched since Google I/O. We’ll be providing the four Ps: power, ping and pizza pie (that’s power strips, wireless internet and food for those of you that aren’t sure!), as well as experts on hand to help you turn your ideas into great apps. Check out the details of the event and RSVP once you know you can make it!

Ikai Lan   profile Ikai is a Developer Programs Engineer working on Google Apps Script. Prior to Apps Script, he worked on Google App Engine. Ikai is an avid technologist, consuming volumes of material about new programming languages, frameworks or services, though more often than not youll find him advocating pragmatism over dogma in the solutions he proposes. In his free time he enjoys the great outdoors, winning Chinese language karaoke contests and playing flag football. He resides in New York City, where he watches in anguish as his favorite sports teams from the San Francisco Bay Area implode season after season.

Earlier this year I wrote about Agiles perspective on failure. In that blog I indicated that my brother-in-law (a psychologist) sent me some of the latest research on failure. In particular, there were two fascinating studies that helped me understand why failure is indeed a cause for celebration. This is the first in a two part series.

"We find that organizations learn more effectively from failures than successes" 

In a 2010 study (more details at the bottom of this post) on the effects of failure and success on organizational learning, a team of researchers found that failure was a crucial ingredient for longer term success.

In order to find suitable organizational data to support their research they searched for and found an ideal candidate - the Orbital Launch industry. This industry was ideal for the following factors:

• Every launch had a high incentive to succeed due to the high cost of failure.
• Placing objects in space is a relatively new activity so data is available for all launches ever attempted.
• Because it is a high profile industry the records were relatively easy to find.
• The sample data contained 4663 launch attempts, 443 failures, 36 organizations, and 9 countries. The data starts with the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957 and ends March 2004.

(Note: The Orbital Launch industry is responsible for sending rockets into space to place a payload into orbit around the earth.)

As researchers their goal was to look at the causes of improved organizational performance. Did success drive improvements? What part did failure play in future success? Here are a few of their key findings:

1. Organizations learn more effectively from failures than from successes. Success causes organizations to be complacent in the belief that they have figured it all out. On the other hand, failure increases the desire to learn and challenge existing beliefs. Those organizations that fail end up being more successful in the end.
2. Success breeds complacency and overconfidence and reduces the incentive to learn. Organizations who regularly succeed may in fact suffer from this experience in the long term. 
3. Organizations learn more from large failures than from smaller ones. As part of a community that believes in failing (learning) fast, this one is the hardest for me. But at the least it supports the notion of celebrating failure when it occurs in the larger or the small.
4. Organizations should embrace failure so that they can learn from it. One response to failure is to punish those involved or hide the failure. Organizations that are open about their failures have an increased chance of learning and then improving because of it.

As many people like Luke have pointed out - failure isnt the goal. However, when it happens we can either run from it or celebrate it. The evidence from the Orbital Launch industry strongly suggests that celebrating failure is in order. For even more reason to celebrate, take a look at part 2.

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Sometimes in order to make a change happen, all you need to do is change the environment.

This summer I witnessed a great example of this in a small but fantastic aquarium in Ucluelet, BC. When you see a sea star in the ocean or at the aquarium, you rarely or if ever see them move. However, the staff at the aquarium instigated a sea star race by changing the environment. They put the feared Morning Sun Star in the same tank with other sea stars including the very large Sunflower Sea Star. Once the other sea stars detected the presence of the Morning Sun Star they all started to move away from it as fast as they could. The sudden reactions and speed of those sea stars was a sight to see – a turtle would have been proud!

If you have analysts, developers, testers and users who don’t communicate very well you can help encourage better communication by changing the environment. Create a co-located space and then have them all work in that space together. The environmental change forces them to acknowledge each other’s presence and begin working together. Instead of “Hey, there’s a dangerous Morning Sun Star in here and I have to run away before it eats me”, you should get reactions like “Hey – there’s a user in here, I guess I’ll show them the changes I’m making to this screen to get some feedback”.


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You might have seen the announcement last week about OAuth 2.0 coming to Google APIs. It’s a great step forward that will make it much easier for web, mobile, and desktop applications to securely access user data. What you might not have heard is that OAuth 2.0 already works with many of the Google Apps APIs like contacts, calendar and docs.

Because the spec is still under development, OAuth 2.0 support is considered experimental until the spec is stabilized. In the mean time, if you’re interested in learning more about it you can give it a try with some of the APIs you’re already familiar with.

One small tip -- if you know the user is a Google Apps account and you already know the user’s domain, try adding the query parameter “hd” with the domain name as the value when requesting authorization. The hint helps provide a better login experience for Google Apps users. For users on domains that haven’t yet upgraded to the new account system it’s required for now, but we’re working on improving the user and developer experience to make it even easier.

Posted by Steve Bazyl, Google Apps Marketplace Team

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Google Drive lets users create Docs, Sheets, and Slides, collaborate on them in real time, and have their changes saved instantly and automatically. With the new Google Drive Realtime API, you can now easily add the same real-time collaboration that powers Google Drive to your own apps. This new API handles network communication, storage, presence, conflict resolution, and other collaborative details so you can focus on building great apps.

Developing for the Drive Realtime API is almost as simple as working with local objects. The API provides collaborative versions of familiar data objects such as maps, lists, strings, and JSON values and automatically synchronizes and stores modifications to these objects. Your application reads from and writes to these objects like any other local object. Change event handlers can be added to collaborative objects so that your app can react to changes from other collaborators.

Because the Drive Realtime API is based on operational transformation (OT), local changes are reflected instantly, even on high-latency networks. The Drive Realtime API automatically transforms changes to the data model so that every collaborator stays in sync.

If basic collections arent enough for your application, the Drive Realtime API supports custom objects and references, including trees and arbitrary graph structures. As with other collaborative objects, the Drive Realtime API automatically synchronizes these objects with other collaborators and stores them in Drive.

Because presence is important in collaborative applications, the Drive Realtime API also keeps track of who is connected to your application and provides your app with events for when collaborators join, leave, or make changes.

Neutron Drive, Gantter and draw.io have enabled realtime collaboration in their apps using the Google Drive Realtime API. Check out these apps to see the Drive Realtime API in action.

Collaborative code editing with Neutron Drive

Neutron Drive is an online editor for text and source code files stored in Google Drive. You can now collaboratively edit any text or source code files stored in Drive and get a collaboration experience similar to Google Docs — shared typing, a view of active collaborators, cursor positioning, and selected text. This all comes in addition to the syntax highlighting and other advanced features offered by Neutron Drive. To learn more, watch the video below:

Collaborative project scheduling with Gantter

Gantter is a free online project scheduling tool and Gantt diagram editor. It now allows you to collaboratively — and in real time — work on your project schedules. It even features an embedded chat powered by the Drive Realtime API. Watch the video below to see Gantter’s new realtime collaboration features in action.

Collaborative diagraming with draw.io

draw.io is a diagraming application that enables you to draw a wide variety of diagrams such as flowcharts, UML diagrams and even electronic circuits. You can now see updates from other collaborators instantaneously, with colored visual cues indicating who has changed the diagram and where that change occurred. Try the new draw.io collaborative beta at rt.draw.io and watch the video below.

Learn more about the Drive Realtime API

We also built a collaborative colored cube puzzle so you can have some fun while trying out the Drive Realtime API and a Drive Realtime API Playground to take you through the API step-by-step. Both apps are open source so check out our Github repos.

Have a look at the Google Drive Realtime API technical documentation and start making your app realtime-enabled!

Brian Cairns   profile Brian joined the Google Drive team in 2011 and lives in Boulder, Colorado. He is currently the lead software engineer for the Drive Realtime API.

Todays Google home page celebrates the birthday of Mark Twain with images that tell the story of Tom Sawyer convincing his friends to whitewash his fence for him. It is an example of making the undesirable desirable. You can read more about the story on wikipedia and here are some pictures of the story courtesy of google:



Tomorrow an article I wrote on Agile Adoption will be published by InfoQ. One of the strategies and patterns for change in that article is to "make the undesirable desirable". Here is an excerpt from the article:

"A colleague of mine recently experienced some resistance from his team when he asked them to try pair programming. Instead of forcing them to do it, he simply asked ”What would it take to get you to try it?” When they joked that they would gladly try it if they had a big screen TV to use for paired programming, he quickly obliged and the rest was history. The new behaviour became fun – it became desirable."

Although Tom used this strategy for selfish gain, this strategy can also be used to affect positive change in your organization. You can find more strategies and examples useful for your agile adoption in the InfoQ article.

I know its not Tuesday, but heres a special Technology Wednesday post!  A few people commented about that annoying white border that pops up with you "print" a PDF of your PowerPoint.  Heres how to get rid of it!

URL: http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0752.asp

Authors: Anne H. Moore, Shelli B. Fowler, and C. Edward Watson

Methodology used: http://www.webometrics.info/methodology.html
Best Practices: http://www.webometrics.info/best_practices.html

• Size (S) - Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum.
• Visibility (V) - The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are log-normalised to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank.
• Rich Files (R) - After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). These data were extracted using Google and merging the results for each filetype after log-normalising in the same way as described before.
• Scholar (Sc) - Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items.

The four ranks were combined according to a formula where each one has a different weight:

WR (position)= 4*RankV + 2*RankS + 1*RankR+ 1*RankSc

Alright, that was easy, but what can we do to improve our ranking? Lets explore some Best Practices we could take, which is discussed on the WR site (This is the extracted juice version. Please read the full version, too) .

Best Practices?

1. URL naming - Each institution should choose a unique institutional domain that can be used by all the websites of the institution.
2. Contents: Create - A large web presence is made possible only with the effort of a large group of authors. The best way to do that is allowing a large proportion of staff, researchers or graduate students to be potential authors.
3. Contents: Convert - Make them all available on the Web (if possible), including past activities reports or pictures collections.
4. Interlinking - If your contents are not known (bad design, limited information, or minority language), the size is scarce or they have low quality, the site probably will receive few links from other sites.
5. Language, especially English - Language versions, especially in English, are mandatory not only for the main pages, but for selected sections and specially from scientific documents.
6. Rich and media files - Bandwidth is growing exponentially, so it is a good investment to archive all media materials produced in web repositories. Collections of videos, interviews, presentations, animated graphs, and even digital pictures could be very useful in the long term.
7. Search engine friendly designs - Use directories or static pages, and avoid cumbersome navigation menus based on Flash, Java or JavaScript that can block the robot access...
8. Popularity and statistics - Number of visits is important, but it as much as important to monitor their origin, distribution and the causes why they reach your web sites.
9. Archiving and persistence - To maintain a copy of old or outdated material in the site should be mandatory.
10. Standards for enriching sites - The use of meaningful titles and descriptive metatags can increase the visibility of the pages (e.g. Dublin Core).

Ethics?
They reject the use of abusive positioning techniques that can generate misleading indicators (How they monitor this aspect would be interesting to know).

Reflection Time!
Coming to think of it, whether we rank high or not on the WR is not really important. The real importance to me is our passion and desire to learn, reflect and share/discuss our ideas, knowledge, expertise, and experiences beyond our University borders (or even between faculties avoiding the faculty clan knowledge only phenomena), and participate/collaborate in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement (or any meaningful knowledge sharing movement). The Internet provides us with an amazing channel(s) to connect and contribute to the world of learning (well, at least to more than one billion people). In general, we can only gain by sharing our knowledge and expertise to the world (marketing, awareness, social responsibility, networking, collaboration, rewards, appreciation, recognition, etc.), and by doing so interestingly our WR rank will improve, too.

We might be thinking now, if we share our ideas, knowledge, expertise and experiences to others, we might look stupid or loose our power (Hoarding knowledge is power!). If we are thinking like that, I suppose we are ... :)

Its Tuesday again, and we are finally getting around to the long awaited tutorial... how to browse YouTube Safely in the Classroom!




Now... I have to tell you when I first stumbled across this website, I had a "duh" moment!  I wonder if youll have the same experience when you see the title of the website:



The website does have a disclaimer that it filters videos as much as it can, but that it might not catch 100% of them.  That being said, Ive never had any issues while browsing it!  The site is pretty self-explanatory, but I typed out a quick tutorial for you anyway!

So I realized that I havent done a giveaway since summer time, so this is long overdue!  I have so many products new and old that I want to share with you... a whopping $72 worth of items that you can win!

This weeks tutorial is one of the most requested things people ask me... "How do I find free clipart to use in my commercial items on TPT?"  Well... this tutorial will hopefully answer that question!


This option won in the poll, but how to print on envelopes was a close second!


Here are the links to the websites I mention in the tutorial!  You can read the notes below to learn more about the websites and to see some tips as well!








Now... heres the descriptions and tips/tutorial!

 



As for next weeks tutorial, Ill add another TPT oriented option: how to lock down clipart in a PDF!