The video:

Please leave a comment if you have any questions.

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!

]]> http://fiendishlyclever.com/2011/01/google-apps-for-education-keeping-students-on-internal-mail-only.html/feed 0 http://fiendishlyclever.com/2010/05/using-delicious-com-to-search-for-useful-teaching-resources.html http://fiendishlyclever.com/2010/05/using-delicious-com-to-search-for-useful-teaching-resources.html#comments Sun, 16 May 2010 18:30:54 +0000 Rob Butler http://fiendishlyclever.com/?p=1082 Continue reading →]]> 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.

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:

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!

This is a collection of extracts from my logs over the last few months showing some of the more interesting visitors to my site (I’ve removed the IP addresses myself).  The bottom image shows visits from Microsoft and Google following an Outlook web access vs Google rant I had (#GoneGoogle).

I’d only recently noticed that the interface you get depends on the web browser you use.  If like me you use Firefox as your primary browser at work, a huge chunk of functionality is missing already (gee thanks Microsoft!).  The screen grabs below give an idea of the differences.

Straight away I’m using a clunky interface that looks like something from the Nineties to manage my email.  Compare that to Google mail which looks the same in IE, Firefox or Chrome (and I have all 3 browsers installed on all my laptops!).

I was going to write a comparison of the two platforms but it’s hard to find an aspect that OWA excels at.  Contact management is a joke, the PIM functions make me want to stab myself with a biro in frustration and anyone who has used Google mail knows the advantages of tagging mail versus folders.

Most teachers work as much from home as they do from work, if not more.  I know I do.  I like to have access to my emails from home and when I visit other schools.  All of my email that is, not the last two or three in my inbox.  I never take my laptop home – who’d want to use that piece of junk in preference to my own modern machine – which means I need access to email in the cloud.   Look at the generous mail allocation I get from work versus Google Apps email – I can search through archived emails and contacts with ease using the Google interface, without having to fire up a desktop mail client to achieve the same result.  It might help if EMBC gave you a reasonable amount of space – 100Mb is nothing, I’ve sent more email than that in a day!

(Compare that to the standard space allocation provided with Gmail and you see a world of difference.)

Fortunately Google Mail will retrieve emails from my work address, and send replies that look as though they have come from my work address, so I don’t have to soil my hands with Outlook Web Access (or a desktop client).

Until Microsoft comes up with a better interface that works well with Firefox, and EMBC can give us sufficient storage, I’ll continue to use the Google mail interface as my primary mail client.  What’s your email client of choice and why?

Google Custom Search is extremely useful because you can set it to search over a list of pre-selected sites, knowing that learners will be getting the results you want them to see.  It’s also a good tool to use with an interactive whiteboard so no unexpected results come up on screen (even the most innocent of keywords can bring up some dubious results!).

To use Google Custom Search you need a webpage that you can embed the HTML code in – I use Google Sites which is free and simple to configure.  Follow the steps below and create your own custom search engines.  You can even add a logo to your results (and remove adverts if you are a school or non-profit) but I haven’t shown these steps in my guide.

Set up your search engine and enter a list of sites to search 

Once your search engine is set up, follow these steps from the ‘Control panel’

Pick a style and get the code to put on your website

Copy and paste the code and then go to your site to embed it.  These pictures are from Google sites

Use these options to change where the search engine appears on the page, and the size of the search engine box.

Save your page and the custom search engine is ready for use.

• Disable sharing outside of the domain unless you know need this functionality.
• Make sure pupils are aware of the sharing status of their own site.
  
• Have all pupils tag their Google site with a class or even site-wide tag so make monitoring easy
  

Google – you need to add an easy way of checking if any of your employees are leaking company information by mistake!

I started with a Google Apps account and gradually added Google services to it.  I always assumed that I had one Google account, and that as administrator of my Google Apps domain, that I could reset the password etc easily if I was hacked.  Not so, because what I actually had was two Google accounts that had the same login details and the same password.

It suddenly made sense why PicasaWeb would not tag my images using my Google Apps contacts, since these were two separate contacts lists on two separate accounts.  I found Google Docs I had contributed to in my Google account, whereas most of my work documents were in my Google Apps account.

As a solution I migrated all my email and contacts to my GMail account (on the Google account).  I could now tag my Picasaweb photos using my contacts in my address book.  The contacts were also present in Google reader as well so I could now email articles to my friends.  It made sense to have all my services in one common account but this created a problem.

If you’ve used GMail to send email from a different address to your own, some recipients see a “on behalf of” message – e.g. From: userxx@googlemail.com on behalf of userxx@domain.com.  I didn’t think this looked very professional but Google has a solution.  Using the technique recommended by Google I set up another sending address but using the Google SMTP server with my Google Apps login details.  Now (as intended) I can send email from my GMail account and it looks like it came from my Google Apps account, and as a bonus an extra copy of outgoing mail is saved in my Google Apps accounts.

I’m not sure that using my GMail account is as professional as using a Google Apps account, but to recipients of my email there is no distinguishable difference.

There is very little operational difference between Google Apps email and regular GMail apart from the fact that the contacts list for Google Apps accounts are not shared with other Google services.  You can also add extra storage to a regular GMail account but this is not possible with a Google Apps account (unless you upgrade to the the premier version).

With many schools and businesses moving to Google Apps, I think it is important to be clear about the difference between the two types of account.  It would be nicer to see closer integration between Google Apps and Google accounts but I can see the reasons why this has not been implemented.

The last week I’ve run repeatedly into the same problem, and I’m sure that some other users must come across.  The problem occurred when I wanted to send an email to a group of science coordinators across the county.

I even have a list of emails set up in my contacts address book (on Google) for this purpose.  I emailed the group with an update and a link to a Google form for them to complete (only 8 users in the To: field).

The email bounced with the following message (Message rejected.  See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information):

The solution in the past was to split the users between the To: and CC: fields.  I tried this again as my tried and trusted method of getting my email sent (in the absence of any useful advice from Google).  The email wasn’t sent and I received the following message instead (the error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded):

It now transpires that I am unable to send any email, at least for the rest of the day (at least) because google think I’m a spammer.  Nice one Google.

My email had a Word attachment and a link.  It was sent to a group of 8 people (all in my contact book).  It seems that this makes me a spammer.  Is it not within the realms of possibility that there are users out there who may want to send a link to a group of contacts.  Directing me to use Google Groups is not a workable solution Google – since most of the people I am trying to contact have barely mastered email.

I would advise Google to tweak their spam detecting algorithms.  If you have lots of people opening accounts to send spam, perhaps you need to look at the meagre amount of information you need to give to get a google account rather than cutting off your loyal users who merely want to email a link to a list of contacts.

Google touts its apps suite as a dependable and reliable system, and yet it has gaping holes like this, and yet it has published very little information for users telling them what to happen if this happens.  Google sort your act out if you want to see more people who have #gonegoogle.