Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Use Text Blaze to Dramatically Improve and Speed Up Your Online Work”.
In this article, i will show you a google chrome extension that will change the way you work online and will save you hours and hours of time, and it’s called textblaze and what is textblaze. It’S a text expander. In other words, you can write a small snippet of text and textblaze expands it out to a more full sentence, paragraph even a whole email or a form, even that you could send someone. Textblaze is great for educators, social media, influencers, customer service agents and anyone else that finds themselves typing the same text over and over and over. Let’S take a look at how it works.
The best way to get started using textblaze is to receive an invitation from someone already using textblaze the reason why is because you’ll get either one month or two months of the pro version for free? That invitation can also be simply through a link. If you look in the description below this video, i include a link that for right now gives you two months free if you use it to sign up. Alternatively, you could just go to blaze dot today and sign up on your own either way once you’ve signed up for textblaze you’ll be prompted to install the google chrome add-in, and i’ve heard that this also works for microsoft edge. I haven’t tested that myself, but here i am in my dashboard at blaze.today and when i did sign up, i did agree to install the textblaze extension. The thing is, i don’t see it here in my list of extensions. The reason why is because it’s brand new to this account – and i have to click here on this extensions button and go down and choose textblaze and i’m gon na, pin it to my list of extensions okay.
So i’ve got my account set up and i’ve got the google chrome textblaze extension. Let’S take a look at how textblaze can help me and you to save lots of time and effort. So in my textblaze account it’s giving me some sample snippets, and this is just for demonstration purposes only. It says to type forward, slash style and when i do it’s replaced with more complicated text. The second example forward: slash d8 and there’s all these other demos that you can try just by clicking here.
It will teach you how to do each of these things in textblaze, but let’s start creating our own textblaze snippets here in the upper left. There are two main buttons that i’ll use over and over as i use textblaze. The first lets me create a new snippet.
The second button lets me create a snippet folder and in my case i want to start with a snippet folder, so i click there and i get a new blank folder. I can always right click on it to rename the folder and i’ll call this education as an educator. I would like a list of snippets that i can use to save me lots of time as i grade online work, while i’m at it i’m adding a second folder.
This one will be used for online gaming and a third this one’s going to be. For my small business now that i’ve got some folders, i can easily click on one of those folders and click. This plus sign to add my first blank snippet here it is, and here at the right, a form appears, and i can use this form to create the snippet.
Now before i actually create this snippet. I want to show you why i feel so strongly about this tool textblaze and how it’s helping me as a teacher and also in other aspects of my life here. I am in canvas in a class that i’m teaching and, as i’m grading the work of these students i find myself using similar language over and over and over, for example, i’ve typed in some text here and chances are that other students in the same class will Receive similar feedback from me now i could type that again and again and again or i could switch over to textblaze and put in the text that i want inserted and then i need to put in a name for this new snippet i’ll. Just call this excellent gamification plan and then here at the right, i’m going to put in a shortcut that i’ll have to type in order to produce this text here, how about forward slash exg? Now, let’s try it out here in the gradebook in canvas instead of typing out. My message word by word: i’m just going to put in forward slash exg and by typing those four keys in that sequence. It saved me typing all of the rest of these characters.
That is just so smooth and priceless really for just about anyone who works a lot online now. What? If i would like to personalize this message, a little better, for example, i would like to use amy’s name in the message itself so that she really feels that this comment applies to her and that i’m personalizing it to her in textblaze. All i would need to do is find the spot where i’d like her name to appear put in a space in this case and i’ll put in a left, curly bracket and then i’ll type, the word cursor and then the right curly bracket, you’ll notice that textblaze Changes the highlight color of that text, and now next time i use this keyboard shortcut. It’S going to give me a little bit different results that can be more easily personalized. Let’S take a look this time in google classroom, so i’m going to click on this assignment and i’ve selected a specific student and i’ll click here to add a private comment, i’ll put forward, slash e, x g and notice. What it’s done text blaze has put in the same exact text, but it’s placed my cursor exactly where i typed the word cursor. So now i can easily add the name of the student and then click to post. The response so imagine having a whole folder full of snippets like this, that take long, complicated text, that’s important and shortens it to something that you can quickly type. But then you can also customize how powerful would that be and how much time would it save you? I’M going to click up here on the plus sign again to add another snippet. This one is going to be a message for people who need to post more in the discussion board.
I’Ll have the shortcut be modis for more discussion and then i’ll type in here. The full message: okay, so i’ve typed that up, but i want to point out some other things you can do with textblaze that you can’t, with other text, expanders notice that for my message here, i have a toolbar and using the tools on that toolbar. I can add all sorts of formatting to my text. I can make this italicized, i can underline text. I can bold certain text, i can even add photos and it will upload those photos into text blaze.
In this case it doesn’t make sense to have the photo. So i’ll delete it. I can also put in links just by highlighting text clicking the link button and then i can put in the link that i want to include other things i can do include highlighting changing the font, color, adding bullets and much much more and now, let’s try the Shortcut this time, i’m going to try it in google docs so forward, slash modis, there’s my text, the italics, the highlighting color the link.
All of this formatting has automatically been put into my document now. In order for the formatting to work, you have to be putting it into a system that can handle it, so google docs can handle bold, it can handle italics, highlighting, etc, and so they worked. But if i try to use this same snippet in a system that doesn’t allow for those things, then of course it wouldn’t work. Let’S look at two other cool features that you can use in textblaze, i’m going to add a new snippet and i’m going to call this one. Please read for the shortcut this time: i’m not going to use forward slash you don’t have to use forward slash, but the nice thing about forward. Slash is, if you use it chances, are you probably won’t accidentally type the shortcut when you don’t mean to, but i’m just going to use pls rd as the shortcut for please read and then here i’ll just type, something like students. Please read the following paragraphs. I’Ll put in a colon, i’ll, tap return or enter on the keyboard and then i’ll put in a left, curly bracket and i’ll just type clipboard, and then a right, curly bracket, i’ll tap enter a couple of times and then i’ll type.
Something like what is the main idea of these paragraphs now, having created this watch, what i can do, i could go to a web and click and drag to highlight text copy that text and then go to my classroom, whether it’s in canvas or google classroom or Anywhere else, that’s an online environment and then i can type in my keyboard shortcut and look what it does. It puts in the snippet that i typed, but it also puts whatever text i had copied also into the document, and i could have included quotes. That would have been a good idea that way. This exact quote from the newspaper would have been marked as clearly a quote, but still how powerful is that now it’s very possible to use these tools to create shortcuts and snippets that produce not just a few paragraphs but maybe an entire document.
Perhaps a contract or an invoice, or things like that that you could insert into google docs or another online environment just with a short keyboard shortcut. I also want to point out that down here at the bottom of the snippet screen, i have some dynamic content that i can pull into my snippets, for example the current date. Maybe i want the long full date, so i just click there and it’s automatically added to my snippet. What about the current time? I could do that as well.
I could add forms and other dynamic content, and there are even more dynamic features that you can add in to your textblaze if you’d like. So i hope that you can see how powerful textblaze can be for anyone that types, a lot of content, especially similar content over and over and over. So it’s fantastic for teachers, leaving feedback for their students, it’s fantastic for small business owners or anyone that works in a business environment for administrative assistants, customer service agents, programmers and coders, and on and on textblaze will end up saving you hours and days of your life Because you’re able to type much more quickly than you otherwise could now textblaze does have a free option, but you’re limited to 20 snippets or fewer. But if that’s all, you need that’s going to be a great option for you, but notice that the pro account is only three dollars per month.
That’S less than 40 dollars a year and with all the time that you’ll be saving it’s a great option and remember to look in the description below this video and you’ll get at least one month of pro for free and for at least a limited time. You’Ll be able to get two months of pro for free if there’s a lot of interest in this article on textblaze i’d love to make a follow-up video that shows some of the advanced, very exciting things that you can do with textblaze. If you’re interested leave a comment in the description below the video in the meantime, thanks for watching, i hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow and subscribe, and when you do click the bell so you’ll be notified.
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