Using Language tool in spreadsheets

Spell checkers have evolved a lot, and I think one that works very well is Language Tool.

It is an extension that is installed in the browser and, from then on, it warns you of spelling and grammatical errors in almost all the texts you write in your browser: documents, presentations, blogs, etc. If you do not have it installed, you can do so at this link.

But it does not work on spreadsheets. It does not recognize the cells of spreadsheets as text, and this means that it does not mark the errors. In the educational field (and also in the business field), this is a major limitation, since we use spreadsheets a lot: to make notebooks to monitor the progress of students, end-of-term bulletins, school organization, etc.

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Conditional formatting in spreadsheets with cells from different sheets

It has been some time since I last wrote an article that was a bit technical and not at all pedagogical. Today I want to talk about the conditional formatting of Google spreadsheets. Recovering a functionality of my gradebook I have found this casuistry and, if you don’t know it, maybe it can be useful for you.

As most of you know, conditional formatting in spreadsheets, as the name suggests, allows the formatting of a cell to change if certain conditions occur. For example, we can make a cell with a number appear red if it is negative or black if it is positive. What I want to show in this article is how to change the format of a cell based on the values we enter in another cell that is also in another tab of the same spreadsheet (or better said, in another sheet of the same spreadsheet).

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CLASS-MON, an add-on to encourage self-evaluation and self-regulation of students

Today I present the project from my participation in the Google Innovators Academy that took place a year ago in Madrid, ESP18. A very rich experience for me, both for the intensive learning and for the relationships with other innovators. During this year Nay Belaunzarán has accompanied me and tutored the project and I only have words of gratitude for her.

But let’s get down to business. Here’s aadd-on for spreadsheets with a very clear purpose. To help students to self-evaluate in order to learn to self-regulate. It may sound very pretentious and the complement is really very simple.

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How to create a bank of resources?

Last September, the group of moderators of the GEG Spain community (I am lucky enough to be a part) created a resource bank to order all the material created at community meetings and to add other resources that could be useful to the community.

The idea was easy. To be able to easily access presentations, video and other resources. But we thought it necessary to add a social layer, so that the resources could be valued and comments left.

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Working with Google documents offline

All of us who work mainly in the cloud (in my case, almost exclusively) have heard comments like: “It’s great to have all the information in the cloud, but the day you don’t have the internet you won’t be able to do anything”. This statement has not been true for a long time now, but it’s okay to remember it and see how to set it all up so that we can really work when we don’t have access to the network. In this article we will see how to access documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Google format that we have on Drive and how we can work. It is necessary to specify that, for the moment, we can only work with these 3 types of files. Therefore, without connection we will not be able to work with sites, forms, drawings, mymaps, etc.

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