Tips and Tricks for 2026: Chrome and Gmail

[music] Welcome to the edtech throwdown. Join us, Eric G and Nick Johnson, as we dive into today's [music] best edtech tools, tips, and practices. We do the research so you can teach your class. Remember [music] to follow us on social media like Instagram X or Facebook by looking [music] for the handle @ edtechthrowdown. Now, please enjoy the show. [music] Welcome to the EdTE [music] Throwdown. This is episode 207 called Tips and Tricks for 2026, Chrome and Gmail. In this episode, we'll talk about some of our favorite tips for surfing the web with Chrome and sending or receiving emails in Gmail. Hopefully these hacks can help make your day a little easier. This is another episode you don't want to miss. Check it out. [music] All right, we are back for episode 207. We're doing this on a Friday. [music] Our release date is on a Monday and it looks like we're going to get a pretty significant snowstorm. So Nick, what is your take on this snowstorm? You are the weather person, your meteor meteorologist Johnson today. >> That's right. >> How many inches? When is it coming? And will or we will we not have school Monday, Tuesday? >> My take is no school, but it's going to be a bust of a storm because they're all they're all busts. I've already it started as like on my Instagram I was seeing these posts like 20 inches or 40 inches blah blah blah and I can already see it every single day it's a little bit less now there's a they're saying it's a you know one of those mixes it's like a snow it's a wintry mix for part of it and it's down from 15 to 18 to I think my weather app says 6 to 10. So my prediction is that tomorrow they're going to say well actually three to six and maybe it hovers there but it's going to be another big old busteroo because that's that's that's all that's all they ever are. Now I should add part of that is me just trying to downplay it cuz I would rather be pleasantly surprised to see like a whole bunch of snow cuz I miss these like giant snowstorms that we used to get at least once or twice a winter. So, that's my official guess and that's why I'm making it. How does that sound to you? >> It sounds extremely Debbie Downer. >> Yeah, that's how I'm feeling about. >> Like I I just brought it up on my phone. >> What? So, what does yours say? >> 15 to 18 in. >> Oh, for real? >> Yeah. >> What app do you use for that? >> That's Apple weather. >> No way. >> 15 to 18 in on Sunday. >> All right. Well, what the >> So, what I'm going to say is because around here, it just seems like if there's like a mention of snow, we're off. >> I'm going to say that we're going to be off for at least a week. >> All right. So, this will be a good little time capsule because this is Friday. If you're listening to this on the release day of Monday, then the storm will be wrapping up or have already happened. So, ACE says 6 to 10. Apple weather says 15 to 18. Only time will tell. Nick Johnson says one day I'm gonna go we're going to get off on Monday >> and we're gonna have a half day or delayed open on Tuesday. >> Yeah, you're probably right. >> That's my my official one, but I'm saying it with optimism. All right, >> because unlike you, I woke up on the right side of the bed. >> Good for you. I'll play the pessimist this episode. And speaking of optimist, you know, let's go into this very enthusiastic episode of tips and tricks for 26. This episode is brought to you by me going into a classroom just randomly. And I do this from time to time. If if I walk by a classroom, it looks like they're working on a project or something, I'll just go in and check it out. and it's a way for me to get into classrooms, see if I can offer a little edte tool, tip, or trick for them. And I happen to be going into a classroom and a teacher had seven tabs up on the the whiteboard and she accidentally closed all of them and she she panicked because she didn't have all these tabs like memorized or or saved anywhere. I said, "Look, we could go to your history, but just use uh control shift t." And then she was like, "But I'm on a Mac." And I was like, "Well, we're Google. We're like a desktop, you know, laptop type of district here. We don't use Apple, but try command shiftt on a Mac." And she goes, "What does that do?" And I was like, "What does that do? You don't know what that does?" And I'm still thinking that everybody knows some of my favorite tips and tricks even though we share them a lot. So she she did the com command shift T. All of them came back and you know she gave me a big hug as she was like I wish I knew this like 15 years ago when I started >> and I was like well now you do. >> Yep. I'll give you I'll give you another one of those that comes up I know for you all the time and for me all the time. zooming in and out in your Chrome browser. Control plus control minus. We help people solve a lot of issues when there's like a popup window where they're trying to fill out a form or do something and it's kind of cut off on the bottom of your screen or you've got a you've got like a different browser that popped up maybe after you're switching monitors. There's all kinds of weird little issues that result in this problem. There's a button you're trying to click that's at the bottom and everybody's like, I can't scroll down far enough. blah blah blah. You've probably had this issue and it's a it's usually a zoom thing which you can do like by clicking the little magnifying glass in your browser or control plus control minus. We do it so often it's like second nature and it's one of the first things I try but it's it's along the same lines when you show somebody they're always like oh wow that's cool. How come I don't know that? I don't know. We we share this kind of stuff all the time but I think most people just don't use it enough to remember it. But that's kind of what this episode's all about. >> Yeah. Just going with that, the other day, speaking of zoom in, zoom out, teacher really wanted to take a snapshot of a page that was up. And I was like, okay, so what's the problem? She goes, well, when I hit print screen, it it doesn't scroll down and get the bottom of it. And I I was like, all right, so zoom out and then use the snipping tool. So there's two there. The zoom out controll minus to zoom out. And that will allow the teacher to get the full picture that was on that web page. And then the snipping tool. If you go down into your like taskbar, there's a little search area. It could be on the bottom or maybe you have it on the side. You can type in snipping tool and that will allow you to only cut or take a copy of whatever part of that web page that you want to take a part of. So that's how this the zoom in and out function can be used for using the snipping tool and getting screenshots of just specific areas. So, I mean, that's really the motivation behind this episode was that little visit into the classroom. And, uh, we're going to get into a bunch of other ones found within Google Chrome and Gmail. And when we go over Gmail, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft probably has their own version of this. I mean, email clients are not really that different and they typically have the same functionalities. There might be some little nuances, little differences, but for the most part, you'll just have to go find it. And if you don't know where it's at in your email platform, I'm pretty sure if you go into Gemini or Chat GPT, you could type in exactly the functionality that you want and it will be there and they'll tell you how to do it. >> Here's the other thing. For all the tech coaches that listen to our show, you're probably going to know these, but I would say give it a listen. and we're going to try to move through them quickly so we don't tie up a whole bunch of your time. And there might be one or two that that you don't know. But this is more, I would say, for your day-to-day classroom teacher who's listening now who maybe doesn't use these things enough to remember them like I talked about with the issue of Zoom. So maybe that's a good time to pause for a word from the Teach Better Podcast Network. And of course, when we come back, we'll start going through these these tips and tricks for Chrome and Gmail. >> This podcast is a proud member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Better today, better tomorrow, and the podcast to get you there. You can find out more at teachbetter.com/mpodcasts. [music] Now, let's get back to the episode. >> All right, so we're back and we're going to start with Google Chrome tips and tricks. Uh Nick and I both have three a piece. These aren't all the ones that we have, but these are a couple to get us started. These would be great to make like a little newsletter or infographic on, and maybe we'll do that for one of our next edtech newsletters. But these are some of the tools or some of the tips and tricks that we find that people don't know. Not everyone knows. And we take this for granted. And we also, I think, sometimes think that people know more than what they do. And I don't mean that to slight them. I just mean that they haven't been exposed to it. Nick and I love to go listen to other edtech gurus out there. We listen to podcasts. We watch YouTube videos. I go on to Tik Tok and reals and stuff like that. And I like to see what other people know. And then I like to tell people about it. It's kind of just like I consume all this edte and then I like to take the ones that I think would be valuable to our listeners or to the teachers that we work with and we go and do that. So Nick, why don't you get us started? You could probably do all three of yours. I'm I'm thinking that this this episode is probably going to be pretty self-explanatory and uh short and to the point. >> Yeah, since it's really just we kind of have to tell you how to do each one. The applications are a little more obvious. So, let's do I agree with you. Let's do it that way. So, my three Chrome tips, tricks are first QR codes. If you're using an external QR code generator, I would say ditch that thing because Chrome does it for you. Simply navigate to the site that you want to create the QR code for. That includes Google Docs, Slides, whatever is in that URL bar. You're going to go there. Then you go to the top right, click the three dots and scroll down in that menu to something called cast, save, and share. And in that menu will be create a QR code. It pops up the QR code right there in the browser. There's a little download button directly beneath it. So you click that and then you can bring that QR code wherever it needs to be. It's fast, it's easy, it's integrated in the browser, so you don't have to worry about any kind of permissions or viruses from something external. It's all right there. It works great. And they put a fancy little dinosaur right in the middle every time. So that's the QR code gener generator that we've been using now for a couple years. >> And I use that all the time. The only time that I don't use it is when I'm working inside of Canva because they have their own >> and it has a little bit more design friendliness to it, right? I can customize it a little bit more in Canva. But outside of Canva, I'm all about the QR code generator within Google Chrome. >> Yep. My next one is a it's called like smart highlighting, I think, or or link to highlight in Chrome. So, this is neat. If there's a very long website, and the thing that you actually want people to see is farther down on that website, you can scroll down to what you want people to see. Highlight the text you want them to read or at least begin reading. And then with that text highlighted, you can rightclick it and in the menu that pop up pops up, there's an option called copy link to highlight. And then click that. You've now copied a link to that highlight. So anybody that then clicks that link is not only going to go to that web page, but it's going to automatically scroll them down to that starting point. I use this for students who are absent on a given day. So, I want to send them to my website and they have to view lesson seven. Lesson seven is like halfway down the page and I can link them directly to lesson 7 rather than having them scroll to it themselves. It's not a whole lot of extra work for me, but it saves me the kid that says, "I went to your website but couldn't find lesson 7." That's now impossible because I've linked you directly to it. So, that might be a helpful tip for you. as well as my last one which I've just used recently. I had a bunch of pictures in a Google doc and they were blurry and looked kind of bad. So I wanted to recreate the text in those pictures myself by typing it by creating actual text so it wasn't blurry and clear. I started to type it out myself and then remembered that you can search anything on that screen with Google Lens and then Google Lens gives you the option to copy the text within the image. You can do this by going to the three dots in your Chrome browser, finding search with Google Lens. You're going to drag the the boundaries of the search image around whatever text you want and the Google's going to do a search based on that, which you're going to ignore because instead you're going to find the little button that says copy text and then paste that text wherever you want. Now, you're going to have to format it, but you still don't have to waste a bunch of time typing or retyping it all yourself. And that's been very like a very big time saver off and on throughout the years. And those are my three Google Chrome tips. >> Yeah, just a comment on your PDF highlighting your link to highlight. >> That's pretty cool. I didn't know about that one. >> Yeah, it's very cool. >> I knew that you can put like a little mark on a page and then hyperlink it >> and it would go down, >> right? >> But I did not know that you could highlight it. So, that might be a pretty good trick for me to learn and utilize from here on. Google Lens is an awesome tool. There's a lot more functionality to Google Lens than what you said. And if you go over to our YouTube channel, I think you did a video on that that will go over some of those usage cases of Google Lens. >> We might have done a whole episode on Google Lens. I can't I'll look it up while you're doing your three. >> Sounds good. I think we did, too. Yeah, >> maybe 187. >> Maybe. >> That's a guess. All right, let's get into my three. One, like I am a tab machine. It drives Nick nuts. But there are like five tabs that I use every day to start my day. All right. I use one, I watch an inspirational YouTube video or some type of how-to video or something like that just so I'm learning something right off the bat. The second thing I do is my attendance. So, I want that website up. I want my Gmail website up. And I want my Canva website up. All right. Those are the ones that I really use day in and day out. I'm also going to add Gemini on there because I use Gemini a lot as well. So, I have five of them there and I want them all to be organized into a tab bar called favorites. So, what you could do is you could open up each one of these tools that you use or websites that you use and you can add tab to group. So, if you're up in the on the tab and you rightclick it, you'll see add tab to group and then you could create a new group and you could have it organize it by color and all that. But for me, I just put it in my move to group and my group title is favorites. So, it will just be a collection in there. on your bookmark bar, there will be a little like tab there that says favorites. And when you click on it, it will bring up all of your favorites there, all five of those websites. And then you can, you know, click on favorites again up on the tab bars and it will hide them. So, it's it's very simple to bring them all up is what I'm trying to say and to access them. Now, we're not talking we're we're not saving a boatload of time. But if you take that and if I had to open those five tabs 15 times in a day, all right, 15 times in a day times five times in a week, that's 75 different times. Say you're saving a couple seconds each each piece. You're saving roughly, you know, a minute and a half, let's say, a day. All right? Seven minutes a week. Seven and a half minutes a week. You multiply that by how many weeks you're at work, you're saving a couple hours throughout the course of the year. For me, that's well worth it. In in my opinion, that's something that took me two seconds to create and it's saving me a couple hours throughout the year. That's a great investment of time. So, that's my first one, add tab to group. The second one is send tabs across devices. All right. So, what is this one? The other day I was making I wanted to make waffles for my kids and I was at home looking up waffle recipes. Now waffles are pretty easy to make, but I wanted the fluffiest waffles ever made. So I looked up the fluffiest waffles recipe ever made and I found a couple and I was like, "We need to try all of these." So my boys and I, we mixed ingredients together by each recipe and we tested out which recipe was the best, but I had my laptop in the kitchen, which I don't like doing, right? So if I could get that recipe on my phone without having to go through all the steps of looking it up and trying to find the exact URL, then I would have probably used my phone. So, I went on the Gemini and I was like, "How do I send websites from my laptop to my phone?" It said, "Hey, this is pretty easy." If you find a recipe on your laptop and you want to put it over on your other device, you just rightclick the tab or the address bar and you select send to your devices. It will automatically send a popup to any of the devices that is around there that you have claimed as your own. So, I am logged into my phone, so they know that that's my device. A popup came up. I clicked on it, and there you go. The recipe was right on the phone. All right. You could do this with a YouTube video. You could do this with really anything that you could get onto your phone. Now, I'll tell you another way that I have used this is I'm on my computer. All of a sudden, I'm starting to laugh because I found something funny. everyone's looking at me in the room because I can't just sit and watch TV. You have to be on the computer or on my phone or something. So then what I did is I casted it to my television after that. You could do it the same way where you could go to the mirroring option. If you go to your home screen and you down swipe on an iPhone, there's like a mirror your screen and it will find your smart TV. So then I just throw it right up on my TV. So this functionality could go between laptop to phone, phone to TV, whatever you want to do, but it's there. And a lot of people do not know about this. So that's another one. And then my last one, if you wanted to save any web page as an app. All right, so you can do that by going to the site and then going up to three dots. The three dots within Google Chrome. All right. And then if you go down to the save and share cast save and share underneath save it says install page as an app. So, if you go to a I don't know like an ESPN site or something like that or some place science science news daily and you wanted to make that web page into an app on your desktop, you could easily do that just by going to cast save and share install as an app and it's going to save as an app on your desktop. It's really just a shortcut, but I do this on my phone all the time. If I want something that I use all the time for, for example, I'm a youth baseball coach for little league. I have four teams and when I go look at the actual app, it says that I have 15 events every single day. Say I just want my oldest son's team as an app, my middle son's team is an app, and my youngest son's team is an app. So I can actually read the page, and it's not size font six. I'll download all three of those on my phone as an app. And you could do it the same way. Just go to the three dots, download as an app. And now it's on your phone right where your apps are. >> So that's super cool. I just did it with my my class website and it literally puts a little icon on your desktop. I'm over here smiling while you're talking because it turns I there's a a name when you're on a website. There's a teeny tiny little icon next to the URL bar. avoc. >> Yeah, that thing it turns whatever that image is into that icon for your desktop app. So, for me, it's the little cartoon version of of me, which I need to update actually. But now my desktop has a little Chemistry by Johnson. Was it Flavacon? >> Flavon. >> Flavicon there. >> And I can double click it and go straight to my website in app form. So cool. I think the overall message for your three there is just like in general in Chrome, try rightclicking on stuff. Right click on those tabs, go to the three dots. There's tons of things there that we're not even talking about. Like you can now share a tab with Gemini directly. So, if you're on a certain website, you can do AI like Gemini stuff right there without like going back and forth to the actual Gemini app. There's just so many things that Google Chrome can now do and just like seeing them might spark some ideas for you. Okay, so that's the Chrome stuff. Let's go to the Gmail stuff. I'll do my three just like before. If you are maxing out on your storage space in Gmail, yes, that's a thing. In the search bar, you can type the word larger and then a colon and then 10M and it's going to find any emails that are taking up more than 10 megabytes of space. So, you can put them in your trash. You can delete them, clear out that trash can, and save a bunch of room. This is just super fast, super easy, and maybe a big time saver for anybody that's having that problem. My second one is that you guys have heard me talk like a lot about my snoozing of emails and my schedule sending of emails. We continue to share that around to people at our school and we are going to continue to share it on the podcast for the reason we said at the top of the episode a lot of people don't do it. But you don't have to send an email immediately. You can write it and you can get it out of your draft by sending it for a later date of your choosing. You know, I do that for like the newsletters that we write. I don't always want to send them as soon as I make them because maybe I make the newsletter at like, I don't know, 10 p.m. and it's finished right before I go to bed. I'm not going to send it out then cuz nobody's looking. I want to send it out first thing in the morning when people are actually checking out their inbox. So, I always schedule send it for those times. And it's just like a nice convenient thing to use. As well as my last one, which is templates. Gmail can save templates as teachers and I would imagine most professions there's a lot of emails where you send pretty much the same thing over and over again and you do not have to type those over and over again because you can enable this feature for you do have to turn it on first. So you got to go to your settings. So in Gmail that little gear icon you're going to click that to go to settings and click advanced and then scroll to you know the area that has this and you're going to have to turn it on. Once you turn it on, once you are writing an email, there's going to be a little drop-own menu there that allows you to either create a template. So that means type out your whole email template as if you're going to send it and then go to that dropdown, save it as a template, and then next time you go to write that same email, it'll be there. And I've I've set up all kinds of these settings for like when a recommendation letter is finished, I have a template for that. When a student has to make up a test, I have a template for that. When there's like a behavior issue, I have a template for that. And I don't write those things at all. I just apply the template, substitute out, I think I use like a series of underscores to make like a a pretty obvious blank spot in the template. So, I always know that I have to replace that with a student name. But, this has saved me hours and hours and hours of typing, and it's it's good to know. So, those are my three. Searching for attachments, schedule sending, and setting up your templates directly in Gmail. >> All fantastic little tricks within Gmail. I'm actually pretty excited about all of these, all six of them. So, >> I'm going to definitely do that. I got to go through my first one. My first one is probably my favorite thing in the world. When I get worked up about something, someone emails me something and I'm very passionate about it or I'm very upset about it. I like to write the old uncensored email every once in a while. Normally, Gmail gives you a 5-second buffer where you can undo an email that you just sent or say you forgot to send an attachment. I call this the the angry filter or the almost like the uh checks and balances uh way of Gmail helping us out when we're throwing an attitude or a temper tantrum while writing an email. So, if you want to change the amount of time that the the buffer amount of time where you could pull an email back before the other person, you know, sees it. For example, Nick Johnson decided to park in my parking space and I was not happy with said Nick Johnson. I would tell him, "Hey buddy, that's that's my parking spot." And a bunch of choice words after that explaining how unhappy I was with him doing that. I could send it to him after I wrote all that stuff and then just hit the unscent. It's a little fail safe. It's a little protection thing. Now, it will do that for every email. And sometimes that becomes tedious, especially if you're trying to send something real quick to for students to use in class, an extra resource. Then they have to wait 30 seconds. And usually it turns into them saying, "I still haven't. >> I didn't get it. I didn't get it." >> Yeah. All that. So, that could be a little annoying, but I like to keep it there. These are, you know, it's just my safety net. And it it [clears throat] it's my safety blanket. >> Yeah. Good one. There's no reason not to archive. Archive just means it goes away from your inbox. But if you search for whatever you're looking for, it will still pop up. It's not getting deleted after the 30-day window. It's just there and it collects there. And if you're worried about space, like if you're archiving things, you're not getting rid of them. You could use my tip from before as needed. Search for large emails that have been archived to just quickly delete those. >> There you go. So, how do you archive on a phone? I think you just swipe to the right or to the left, depending how you have it set up. If you're actually in your your Gmail on a laptop, there's a little square with a down arrow when you open up that email. So, you could hit that and archive it. I use that all the time. I'm still not at inbox zero like Nicholas over there, but I am getting pretty close. I no longer have my 12 plus thousand emails in there, which drives everyone except me nuts. So, when they see that, like when I'm in my car and my kids see that I have 12,000 emails unread and 49 text messages unread, they get very upset by that. you need to go in there and you need to fix those. And I'm like, I do not and I won't. >> I wonder, do you think your kids are going to be like when they're adults, are they going to be the 12,000 email type or are they going to be the zero inbox type? Like, how are they going to fall? >> I wish that they were clean kids and they tidied up after themselves [laughter] at home. They do not. Right. >> So, I think it's basically my wife says it one time and then since she says it, they remind me. >> Gotcha. Oh, I see. >> It's like having a backseat driver for my Gmail. >> I see. They're just paring her to yell at you. [laughter] >> Yes. I I get it from all angles, but I I wouldn't want it any other way. >> There you go. >> All right. The last one that I have for you, and this one is solid, and I just found it, and I'm going to definitely use it from here on out. If you are in your Gmail, there's a plus addressing hack that you could use. If your primary email, let's just use ours edtechthrowdowngmail.com. You can essentially create infinite aliases using this hack. All right. If you use edtech throwdown and then you add a plus sign and a keyword before the symbol. So if we did edtech throwdown with the plus sign newsletters, anytime someone sends you a newsletter that has newsletter in the title, it will automatically go into a a separate label. So it's its own filter. So if we sign up for 50 different newsletters and we don't want them to go to our inbox, we could just when we go to sign up for that newsletter, we could go edtechthrowdown plus newslettersgmail.com and when those new letter newsletters come into our mailbox, it will skip our inbox and go straight to a label which you can go in there and look at your leisure. So, I really like that one. In order for this to work, I do want to say that you need to create a filter in Gmail. And then when you create the uh filter, you can check the apply to label. So, if you have a label called newsletters, you create the filter that says newsletters and and it will automatically go into that label. But once that's been created, all you have to do when you go to sign up for newsletters and is put plus newsletters after your beginning there. You could do that. There are other ways that you could do this like you some people use a period after edtech throw down period and then you could say I don't know like subscription list or say something that you get coupons for Amazon every day. you could put period Amazon and it would automatically go into an Amazon folder after you create the filter. So, I think that one's another solid one because I get a lot of junk and it's not fun and I'm too lazy to check them and delete them, which is most of my 12,000 Gmails in my Gmail account. >> There you go. That's an easy one. >> So, that's it everybody. There's six for Gmail, six for Chrome. We might do a couple more of these episodes and focus on these like tips, tricks, hacks kind of stuff because it's been a while since we've done it. And like we said, we're just trying to get the word out there. Good luck with the snow if you're listening to this in real time. If you're listening to this at a later date, we hope you're enjoying whatever weather you do have. And as always, thank you for listening. >> [music] [music] >> Thanks for listening to the edtech throwdown. Do us a couple of favors. Subscribe to our podcast on any major podcast catcher such as Apple, Spotify, Amazon [music] Podcast, and Stitcher. Go over to YouTube, search the EdTech Throwdown. Subscribe to the channel. You can connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. [music] The show's handle is edtech throwdown. You can connect with guys at Guys, Nick at Nick got tech. You could write us an Apple podcast review. You could tell your friends about www.edtechthrowdown.com. [music] And lastly, go over and check out our friends over at the Teach Better Podcast Network, a network that we are so proudly involved with. Until next time, remember, go try some edtech because we will do the research so you can teach your class.