Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology

Collaborative Writing using Google Apps (Google Docs)

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Getting students to write can be difficult.  Google Apps is a free service for schools, which includes email, document and calendar sharing.  It is possible to use Google Apps so that several students can work on the same document simultaneously (and see the edits of their co-workers in real time).  On the video below I set up a group of four students to work on a single report, with colour coding to show each students where they have to write (these were SEN students).  Other ideas include collecting data into a shared spreadsheet  or creating shared presentations.

The video:

 

Please leave a comment if you have any questions.

Google Apps for Education – keeping students on internal mail only

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If you haven’t tried Google Apps I can thoroughly recommend it – it is a brilliant tool for doing collaborative work including small group shared writing (several students can edit the same document in real time) and gathering lots of science data into a single spreadsheet (also in real time).  Best of all – it is free to schools!

It is now possible to easily limit the email facility so students can only send internal mail (for safe guarding reasons).  I have posted instructions before explaining how to use Google’s Postini service to quarantine mail heading to or from external email addresses.   Google have now simplified and improved the ability to limit sending of emails outside the domain and this is how you do it.

Organise your users into groups

I put all my students in a single group  (you could have groups for different year groups if you want some to be able to send email).

Configure the email restrictions from the Advanced Tools tasks

I have restricted the students group to only allow email to/from the domains I specify (you can add domains from partner/link schools here so they aren’t blocked).

Test

This is the error message my students get if they try to send email outside of the domain

That’s all there is to it – it is now easier than ever to control email to and from student email boxes.  All we need now is a free message archiving facility Google!

Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources

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This is a piece I wrote for the regional newsletter of the Association of Science Education.

Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!  You can save, share and discover bookmarks with other people.  Because the opportunities to interact using this service are quite limited, it is often allowed in schools where other social sites are filtered out. Delicious is extremely useful for teachers and can be used in two main ways.

Saving and organising your bookmarks.

When planning lessons from home, if I find a resource that will be useful to me in future I save it to delicious (sometimes with a note of explanation).  This means I can access my list of bookmarks from home and school.  I now also have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies.  When you save your bookmarks you can choose if you want them to be private or public.  Public bookmarks are very useful because you can share them with colleagues and even students.  All I have to do is give students the web address to my delicious page  (delicious.com/fiendishlyclever) and they can look through my bookmarks to find the site they want.  More tech savvy teachers can embed this list on the school VLE as a way of sharing links very simply with students.

Searching for new resources and information

People only bookmark sites that are worth revisiting.  Searching the collected bookmarks of users from across the world should return better and more useful sites than just searching Google.  Simply visit the delicious.com main page and use the search box at the top.  Search results (example below) also show how many people have bookmarked each site and key words (tags) added to the bookmark when it was saved.  The search will also return any sites that match the search query in your personal collection.  (There is a save button next to each bookmark so you can save it to your personal list if you find the site useful)

Whilst many teachers do use Delicious to save and share links, many forget that it has tremendous value as a search tool.

Online file sync – USB flash drive replacement software for teachers

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FreeFileSync File sync programs can replace the carrying of USB flash drives.  You simply install the software on your home and work computers, and then when you change a file on one computer the file is copied into the cloud and changed on the other computers that are in the sync relationship.  This saves carrying an unreliable and old fashioned USB flash drive that you have to remember to back up.

A while ago I blogged that I used Windows Live Mesh (beta) for syncing files between home and work.  I’d recently got fed up of the huge wait on boot up while live mesh indexed files on my hard drive and I decided to try some alternatives.  These are my thoughts on the software products I tried:

Microsoft Live Mesh Dropbox Jungledisk
Included storage 5Gb 2Gb 5Gb
(no free option)
Ability to expand storage for a monthly fee n/a 50Gb $9.99
100Gb $19.99		 $3 per month +
$0.15 per Gb (plus transfer fees for Amazon storage)
File conflict resolution yes yes basic (renames file with conflict)
Retain cloud backup of deleted files no 30 days 30 days
Online encryption (with own key) no no yes
Other software features remote desktop to control other PCs on same mesh account can also do cloud based backup of files (non-syncing)
Referral scheme to increase free space no yes no
USB version no yes yes
Access to files through a web interface yes yes Not for sync
Icon on windows explorer to show if file is synced no yes yes
Supported platforms Windows Windows, Mac, Linux Windows, Mac, Linux
History of synced files yes yes no
Website link link
(following this link gets you 250Mb bonus space)		 link

So which did I choose?  There was little difference in transfer speed and overall functionality between products.  Live Mesh took an age to start up (whether from boot or resuming from hibernation) but the other two pieces of software made little noticeable difference to start up times.

At the moment I’m using Jungledisk (I’m on an old plan and only pay the storage fees, not the monthly fee) and I feel safer knowing my documents are securely encrypted in the cloud.  The only catch is the lack of conflict resolution which has to be checked manually at regular intervals.

There are many cloud-based file sync products out there, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried one of the products above or one similar (e.g. sugarsync) for use by teachers.

Update:  I’ve moved to Dropbox because of the relaunch of Microsoft Live Mesh (with corresponding moving goal posts), and I kept getting file conflicts in Jungledisk.  I found Dropbox was extremely reliable and I’ve got my storage limit up to 6Gb with referrals.  Dropbox also links with other services like PixelPipe, providing alternative ways of getting content into your Dropbox.  Remember to follow my referral link to DropBox if you haven’t got an account already – you get extra storage space!