About a month ago, I was speaking to one of the Primary Mandarin teachers at our school and she was sharing with me that Google Docs was limiting in some of the features required to make her work easier when typing in pinyin for the students. I began to ask around to a few people and couldn't find quite what we were looking for in terms of a solution.
Then as luck would have it, I was investigating all the awesome add-ons in Google Docs to try to figure out which ones are most beneficial for teaching when I re-stumbled upon a goodie - Easy Accents. As someone who unfortunately only speaks English fluently, I hadn't had the need to use this add-on personally but as I read about it, I wondered if this was the answer but there were no pinyin tone feature yet.
With a 'Why not?' attitude, I emailed Dan Baker (Network Administrator, Ursuline Academy) on the chance that maybe something was in the works for the future. I cannot say enough good things about Dan. He was so helpful and quick to respond as we both tried to talk about a language we were not familiar with. After consulting with one of our Mandarin teachers, Ei Lin Tan, who created a video to help explain our needs and clarified the tones, Dan came back to us with the Pinyin Tone Easy-Accent Add-On in no time.
Check out our video for a quick overview of how to use
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