Archive for category Tips and Tricks

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I love using Google Calendar, and I love the integration with the calendar on my Droid. But adding events takes way more time and clicking than it should.

I thought, there should be a button on my home screen. It should be set up to piggy-back off of Google Voice-to-Text input. It should allow me to quickly add events to my calendar. When a student comes up to me after class and asks to schedule an appointment, I should be able to hit that button, say, “Meet Bob in my office on Friday at 2PM” and the widget should take care of the rest.

It didn’t take long to get satisfaction. I searched and quickly found “Calendar Quick Add” – this app does everything I just described above. Seriously. It’s amazing. And it’s free.

We didn’t make this one, but I wish we had. Here’s the developer’s website. You should download this app and then go tell the developer how awesome you think it is.

Alright. It’s time to get back to offering up some Android tips and tricks that might be useful for an academic. One of the reasons I was excited about an Android phone was that I thought we would see nice, neat integration with Google Docs. It took awhile, but that integration is finally starting to materialize. Here are two ways to edit Google Docs on Your Android Phone.

Straight in Google!
In case you missed it. Google rolled out an update to the mobile browser within the last few weeks. You can now edit Google Docs from there. Here’s a video the demos it.

Documents to Go
Docs to Go recently released an updated version of their Android App. It now gives you nice integration with Google Docs. It will download the files you select. When you save your changes it is automatically synced back to Google. Docs to Go is pricey ($14.99), but if you’re an academic – you NEED good word processing, and this is a very polished, feature rich app. If you need something more robust and don’t want to wait for Google to add more features to their mobile browser version of Google Docs, then $14.99 may be worth it to you. You can check out Docs to Go here.

I should also note that I just bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab and this app is simply gorgeous on it. A Galaxy Tab plus Docs to Go goes a long way toward laptop/netbook replacement for an academic.

My only criticism of Docs to Go is that it seems to take a long time to load the initial list of your documents in Google Docs, but this wait time is not a deal breaker for me, and I suspect that’s something we’ll see improved upon in future updates.

So there you have it – two ways to edit Google Docs on your Android phone. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks.

If you grade papers electronically in Google Documents, using the method I outline here or here – then you have your students’ papers with you where ever you go.

In the above video, I demo just how easy it is to pull up a student’s graded paper on your phone.

I’ve been using this method without an Android Phone. Here’s a tutorial.

I originally posted this as a review/demo for Android Guys.

I wrote up a tutorial on this a while back on my blog. Here’s a link.