Fiendishlyclever » Google

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!

It’s always good to know someone reads your blog posts

Rob Butler — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:57:43 +0000

My friends ask me why I blog, and why I make the time for blogging. Sometimes I wonder myself why I blog. I’ve posted blog posts that have hundreds of hits, and ones that hardly register. Sometimes I get an email or message about a blog post, but usually I don’t. I carry on blogging, even when I don’t get any feedback, because I know somebody, somewhere will read what I have to say.

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).

Google Custom Search – for use with children with special educational needs (SEN)

Rob Butler — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:53:12 +0000

I posted a while ago about using Google Custom Search with children who need a little extra help. Google have since updated their Custom Search facility and I thought it was worth posting an update (to save people wasting time fiddling as I had to).

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.

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 DNS

Rob Butler — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:03:00 +0000

I recently read about the launch of Google DNS. I don’t use my ISP’s DNS servers, I use OpenDNS and have always thought my service felt nippier. However without any method of testing any test is subjective and lacks any scientific rigor.

I found out about Steve Gibson’s DNS benchmarking software and carried out a couple of tests earlier tonight. It seems that Google DNS isn’t quite as fast as they would have you believe, although it could be network location dependent. I’ll carry on using OpenDNS as I like the security and other features that they offer, but it could certainly be worth keeping an eye on.

VirginMedia have already outsourced their email to Google. Perhaps one day Google will provide their DNS services as well!

Google: friend or foe?

Rob Butler — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:19:00 +0000

After signing up for Google Latitude to try it out, I was impressed by how slick it was. It loaded up all my contacts from my GMail account and then asked me who I wanted my location releasing to. The software worked flawlessly (once I’d managed to sign in) and I could also see my location on an iGoogle gadget. Very impressive.

As mentioned I already use Gmail for my email – between multiple PCs, much faster and more intuitive than using an IMAP-enabled browser. I use Google Calendar for tracking birthdays, important meetings and for publishing my professional calendar. I use Google Sites for sharing my resources, and with my teaching groups to put useful pieces of information online. I use Blogger to write this blog. I use Google Docs to keep some of my work online where I can get to it. All of this accessible from a single user ID and password.
I’ve also read about educators using Google tools (e.g. Google Docs) with their pupils (see here the excellent work Tom Barrett does). I don’t know many people who haven’t got a Google account for at least one of their products.

I had a conversation with our Information Manager at work, about the forthcoming data retention legislation. I object strongly to local councils, government departments and other state bodies having access to my email and communications data without proper safeguards and controls. Anyone who read my email would be bored to tears, I am a fairly average (read dull) law abiding citizen – but it is the principle of the legislation I object to. Then our data manager pointed out the irony of my position when I willingly hand all my personal data over to Google.

For 2 years I’ve enjoyed the convenience of GMail with its excellent spam filtering. I’ve enjoyed the wealth of products that Google has to offer, but I haven’t really stopped to consider why it offers those services, and what is in it for them?

I have found many and varied opinions on the web, some specific to Google and others to the wider implications of data privacy. I’m a little less comfortable with Google than I was, to the point that I’m wondering if to move my email elsewhere.

Do you use Google’s tools? How do you feel about your privacy? Are you bothered? I would appreciate your feedback/comments below.