Fiendishlyclever » Google Apps

Collaborative Writing using Google Apps (Google Docs)

Rob Butler — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:09:44 +0000

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

Rob Butler — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:00:32 +0000

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!

Google Sites within Google Apps Education Edition

Rob Butler — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:40:00 +0000

I love the idea of Google Apps – the collaboration, the portability, the platform independent tools and so on. Even though we are a special school I jumped on the bandwagon and signed up for the education edition. I’ve experimented with Google Apps with my pupils, where their literacy allows.

This evening I came across a tweet from @mrstucke asking “To monitor sites in GApps domain goto list of your sites http://bit.ly/8sn8if click ‘browse sites within…’ – does this show all sites?“. I decided to check.

Because we don’t use Google Apps extensively, I didn’t separate staff and pupil accounts. The same restrictive email filtering rules are applied to all non-admin accounts, and Google sites are permitted to be shared outside of the domain. I have used Google Sites to post links, resources and even to share planning with another school.

I have recently been using Google sites with year 10/11 pupils who have been building basic sites in Entry level ICT. As part of the creation process I asked them to enter “classX” in the categories field (it makes it easier for a teacher to find them later) and I asked them to make sure that the “let anyone in the world view this site” box was unticked as below.

I had always assumed it would be easy to check which sites are public and which are not. It wasn’t until I checked this evening that I discovered it isn’t as obvious as it should be. I’m sure that any school or business admin would like to see which information is being shared outside the domain – since this could easily happen accidentally.

When you enter Google sites you are presented with a list of your own sites. Next to each site it helpfully shows the categories (entered above), who the site is shared with, and the site description. So far so good.

Then you browse sites within your domain and you get to see the categories that come up (you can see we haven’t been too careful with category names and some pupils even have used their names).

When you click on a category you get a list of sites within that category showing the sharing status of each.

The list above shows the first attempts of my entry level group. You can now see that they are all shared within the domain (my preferred option for a special school) but not outside of the domain.

So what can we learn from this?

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!

Google Apps vs Google Accounts – the difference between them.

Rob Butler — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

I’ve used Google Apps for my domain, and until recently I wondered why I could have two separate Gmail accounts on the one login. I’ve read various explanations of how Google accounts worked but it wasn’t until I disconnected my Google Apps account from my Google Account that the truth sank in.

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.

Google Mail decides I’m a spammer and cuts off my email sending. # Googlefail

Rob Butler — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:36:00 +0000

For years I’ve used and recommended Google Apps and Gmail to others, and have found them extremely reliable.

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.

Moving mail from one GMail account to another with tags intact.

Rob Butler — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:23:00 +0000

I recently had to move my mail between a GMail account and a Google Apps GMail account. It is possible to move mail from one to the other with all tags intact, however there are several steps (the exact number depends on the number of tags you have) but the process consists mostly of repeating the same step.

Enable IMAP on both Gmail accounts and configure your mail client for both. I used Windows Live Mail since it has a “Copy to folder …” option (and of course is free and readily available for Windows 7).

Replicate the tags structure for your destination GMail account so that it has all the tags of the source GMail account. You can do this from inside the GMail web interface (while you enabling IMAP support).

Configure and sync both accounts in your mail client so you have a full list of tags (folders in your mail client) for both.

Your mail client sees the GMail tags as folders. Go to the first folder you want to transfer – in the image I am copying my sent mail. Select all the mail you want to copy.

Right click on your selected mail and select “Copy to folder” and then select the same mail folder of the GMail account you are copying to.

Click OK and you will see a progress bar as your mail client copies the mail from account to account.

You must repeat this for every folder/tag you want to transfer including the all mail folder (if you want to move everything or untagged email). Keeping copying them to their corresponding folder on the destination account.

When you have finished the tagging/folder structure should be identical for both accounts.

You may also want to move your incoming mail filters and contacts from account to account as well. Google provides a Google Labs feature for moving your filters, and you can export your contacts in a Google friendly format for moving from one account to another.

That’s it. If you have a few hundred Mb of mail the transfer doesn’t take too long (depending on your connection speed). You might want to do this at a quiet time of the day so that Google’s servers are under less load.

Update: I’ve just found an excellent piece of software that does automatically what I was doing manually. It is called GMail Backup and is available from here. Download the email from the account you are moving from, then change the settings and restore to the email account you are moving to. The software takes care of labels etc (I’ve tested it with Google Apps and Gmail and have used it to move email in both directions).

Setting up Postini filtering to use with Google Apps (Education Edition)

Rob Butler — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:43:00 +0000

Last year we started to get to grips with Google Apps, managing to use some of the collaborative tools for entering experiment data, and writing reports as a team. We hadn’t enabled the email because of the lack of filtering. With Google now offering free Postini message filtering to education edition customers, I decided to sign up and see what it had to offer.

The filtering I set up is quite basic. I’ve limited emails to internal emails, and implemented an offensive word filter. I’ve detailed the steps I followed below because I haven’t found a similar guide on the internet. Note that the postini interface could do with a little work to make it more user friendly.
Log into the admin dashboard for your domain. Once you have enabled Postini filtering you need to go to ‘Postini services console’ and then the “System Administration” option. This brings you to a complicated looking screen.
Click the ‘Orgs and Users’ tab as shown below.
Locate your domain and find the entry that ends in ‘Users’ and click on ‘Add sub-org’ to add a group called pupils. This will allow us to apply separate filtering rules for pupils to the staff that use the service.
Next you need to move all the pupils into this group. If you do not move the pupils into this group, they will not get the specific filtering rules. To do this click on ‘Orgs and Users’ followed by users. You then click on the ‘move users’ option. This should bring up a screen like this:

Enter the email addresses of the pupils into the top box (if you have a lot to move you can export the email addresses and then paste them in). This will move the pupils into their own group so you can apply specific filtering rules.
You could also add another group if you wish for pupils who are barred from using the email service, or pupils who you wish to have different filtering rules.
To apply specific filtering rules click on ‘Orgs and Users’ and then select ‘pupils’ from the ‘choose org’ drop down box. This should bring up a busy-looking screen that looks like this:

You will need to enter some rules for inbound services and outbound services. You can change attachment rules, message size and add custom footers (e.g. one with a message explaining the email came from a pupil with an admin contact).
You can find a list of swear words here if you don’t know many!
I inserted the following rules (remember to turn them on when you’ve entered the rule!). In all instances I’ve set the filter to let me know if they are triggered by setting the ‘Copy to quarantine’ option – more on this later.
Inbound services

Delete (black hole) email where the sender doesn’t include yourname.org
Bounce email where the entire message matches any word in the list of rude words

Outbound services

Delete (black hole) email where the recipient doesn’t include yourname.org
Bounce email where the entire message matches any word in the list of rude words

I also turned off spam filtering in Postini, preferring to let Google handle it all for ease of use. I disallowed pupils access to the message centre in the ‘User access’ settings – again for ease of use.
If pupils do send or receive email from outside the domain it disappears into a black hole. A copy will be sent to the admin quarantine box where the admin gets the chance to deliver the email to its original recipient or delete it. By using this system it is possible to hold all external email until it has been verified by an adult.
Adding another rule deleting all email to your domain but quarantining it would allow you to vet every piece of email passing through your site if you need this kind of accountability.

You will get a daily email from the system if you have any emails that have been quarantined. Log into the admin account but this time select the ‘Message Centre’ or just go to the Postini site. Any quarantined email will be under the junk tab. From here you can either deliver the email (to where it was originally sent) or delete it. You can view the email to check suitability and print out a copy if necessary.

Unfortunately none of the filtering options available allow you to copy email to another account, so keeping a record/copy of email sent isn’t possible without paying to upgrade the service from Postini.

Have you got any useful rules or comments you would like to share? Leave a comment below.

Using Google Sites (a wiki) for collaborative working between schools

Rob Butler — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:23:00 +0000

I’ve managed to set up a joint science group between pupils at my own school and another class at a local mainstream school. Pupils will be working together on the mainstream site, with team teaching from staff of both schools.

Clearly working in this way makes planning hard, since the staff involved are on different sites 2 miles apart. In the past when we’ve worked in this way we’ve had to meet up and plan in blocks of lessons, emailing resources and materials between sites. However this time we’ve decided to use technology to make life easier! I chose Google Sites since we already have a Google Apps account for school, and I’ve used it before for personal sites.

The site is a little bare at the moment since we haven’t planned much of the course. However you can see how the site is starting to take shape, with individual modules down the left hand side.

Within each topic I’ve added an overview of the topic as a table, and individual sub-pages for each lesson. Clicking on a lesson brings up an outline lesson plan and all the resources added as attachments.

The real beauty of working this way is that either party can add, delete and edit content, and the site always shows an up-to-date copy of the plans. Another huge advantage is the ability to subscribe to changes – meaning you can opt to receive an email when changes are made to the site by staff from either school.

As the collaboration develops, we will be using Google Docs to jointly create and edit assessment material, and also to track pupils’ progress.

I’ll keep posting through the year and report on our progress. I’d also be interested to hear from anyone who uses a wiki or similar to manage collaboration of any kind.

Wikid Science and Google Apps

Rob Butler — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:12:00 +0000

We are following the Forensics module of the ASE’s Wikid Science. As part of one of the lessons pupils had to write a press release. We decided to use our real science skills and work collaboratively – using Google Docs to work on the same document at once.

Each pupil in year 7 logged on to Google Docs (Education Edition) and loaded up the template I had created (with colour coding for each pupil). Pupils each completed their own section of the press release and could see the updates from their friends in real time.

We would recommend Google Docs to other schools. The price is right – FREE (but bear in mind a maximum of 10 people can work on a document at once).