Articles Worth Spilling Soup For

Well just as always - too much coffee and some late night driving leave me winding down when I should be going to sleep. At least I am using the time constructively.

Did you know that you can put a clip on your blog of your most recently shared articles from Google Reader? I just found it. It is even easy to do - the tools are built right in to Google Reader. You can find some of the articles I find that are worth sharing on the right hand side of this blog (you may need to scroll down a little bit). Look for the title Articles Worth Spilling Soup for.

If you read my blog in a reader then this won't help you. Actually, if you read this blog in Google Reader then why aren't you on my friends list? Email me so we can easily share what we find worth reading.

Skittles and Bits (Again)

Another day, another tech meeting, another head full of ideas. Today we talked about digital citizenship - what is it, what does it look like ("What does it smell like when it goes wrong" - Terrel Hill), and how to teach it.

True to some of the new pedagogical teachings it was not a stand a deliver day - it was collaborative. 25 people working together on one Google Document. We all edited it at the same time (that was an fascinating exercise). I liike that tool.

My thoughts - we all think along similar lines - at least when it comes to education. No running in the halls. When a bunch of teachers get together to create a policy we first think about what behaviors to ban/limit/control. Our Digital Citizinship curricum started out looking like that. (I am not innocent in that regard.) It didn't stay that way - we moved onto more constructive thoughts.

All in all, another great day.

Looking for Pictures

Well the title describes it. I am looking for a picture database. Blog entries always look better with pictures to spice them up. The problem is that thanks to some new found morality I would prefer to not break any copyrights (and most of my pictures are of my son). That leaves out the Google Image search, and Flickr, and most of the other picture sites. Anyone got any suggestions?

Green Eggs and Spam

I think Google has labeled our school as a spammer!

I was setting up a my IP 10 students with Gmail accounts yesterday when I ran into a problem. We all were creating Gmail accounts with a similar form. We all clicked the create account button and only the first few students were able to create accounts. The rest of us got an error message. We couldn't create any more accounts from school. Every attempt at creating a Gmail account after that brought up the error screen!

A little research and I found out that if enough accounts are created from one area Gmail starts disallowing them assuming a spammer is setting up shop. They did mention that teachers setting up class accounts can run into this problem. They recommended Google Apps. Google Apps looked interesting but not something to learn about in the middle of a class with students waiting.

So what did I do? I went home and created the IP accounts at home and will have the students just change the passwords tomorrow. Fun, fun, fun.

At least Google is trying to cut down on automated spammers.

Google Documents Basics

Yay! Rob Wall has been at it again! He has created two more screencasts showing how to use Google Documents.

Here they are:

Using Google Docs, Part 1 and

Using Google Docs, Part 2 (Formatting)

Google Documents is an excellent FREE web based set of office tools (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations). The nice thing about them is that you can access your files from any computer with an internet connection.

Part 1 of Rob's screencast is the basics of opening, using, and saving documents in Google docs. Part 2 shows how to use formatting options like alignment, text fonts, and text colours. If you are familar with other word processors than Part 2 will seem a little elementary but that is ok.

What I am waiting for is for Rob to get to adding collaborators to a Google document - that way multiple people can work on the same document at the same time! Lots of possibilities for us teachers!

Good work Rob. (And thanks for letting me post them here. Blogging is so much easier when you don't actually have to make up anything yourself.)