technology

5 ways teachers will use Google folder sharing

Posted on by Mark Isero

faviconGoogle just announced that you can share folders — instead of just individual documents — in Google Apps.

I’ve wanted this feature for a long time. There are many benefits. Here are five reasons that folder sharing will help teachers and students:

  • Electronic portfolios. Instead of sharing a number of documents one by one, students can turn in various assignments all as one batch. On assignments like portfolios, this will be perfect. Students can collect their best work, put it in a folder, create a cover letter, and use their folder in a portfolio presentation.
  • Organization. One of the hardest things to do in Google Docs is staying organized. When you have thousands of documents coming from hundreds of students, it gets overwhelming. With folder sharing, a student can add in a new document into his or her folder, and you’ll receive it, already organized, in your folder. This gets me thinking: I could create a folder for each student, organize all of them by class, and never have to worry again about tidying up my Docs list.
  • Teacher Collaboration. The leader of the Advisory 9 team approached me at the beginning of the year because she had heard that I had created some good curriculum last year for the class. I told her that my stuff was all on Google Docs and that she was welcome to use my account to find documents she liked. It took her way too long because she had to identify individual documents and share them one by one. Too bad folder sharing is new because it would have saved her a lot of time. Being able to share folders means being able to share lesson plans and ideas for entire classes. I have a belief that our teaching practice will improve because sharing ideas will be easier.
  • No More Sharing Individual Documents. This is similar to the one above, but it deserves its own bullet point. Before folder sharing, I would have two steps: (1) share the document with everyone on my team, (2) put the document into the correct folder. Now #1 is gone! The drag-and-drop functionality reminds me of Live Mesh, except the sync is now with different people and different computers. It actually feels a little like the rumored Google Drive to me.
  • Better Communication with Advisers and Parents. At our school, students get an adviser in ninth grade who follows them until they graduate. The adviser is the student’s advocate and liaison to the student’s family. This means it’s crucial for the adviser to know the student well. Folder sharing will make communication run much more smoothly. When a student creates a new folder, he or she can share it not just with the teacher but also with the adviser, who will collect the student’s work without any additional steps. Furthermore, parents can stay updated even if they don’t have a Google Docs account. The adviser can email the parent a link to the folder. Once again, Google’s folder sharing feels very much like Dropbox or some other simple in-the-cloud syncing and storage application. favicon
technology

Making my class website more useful

Posted on by Mark Isero

faviconMy students have always liked my class website, iseroma.com. It has pictures, a couple videos, and class agendas and assignments.

But my posts are mostly informative and general, and so the site doesn’t encourage students to come back often. There’s a lot of work to do.

This year, I’m hoping to do a number of things to make my class website more useful. One project is to include personal, high-interest content specific to individual students.

Our school has a community service requirement. One of the most popular questions I get from students and parents is, “How many hours do I have so far?” Because this is personal information, I have to go look it up on my Google spreadsheet and personally tell the student or parent.

This, of course, is not efficient. Students and parents should be able to look up important student information whenever they like.

There were many possible solutions to this problem. I decided the best idea would be to put the information up on my class website using a dynamic Google gadget linked from my Google spreadsheet. All I would have to do is to create a password-protected page on my WordPress site so students and parents could safely access the information. Easy, right?

Password Protecting a Page: Much Harder Than It Needed to Be
It all sounds easy enough. Just create a page, edit its visibility to “password protected,” type in a password, and it should work.

Except it didn’t. When I logged out and tried to access the protected page, the password didn’t work.

So I checked out the forums at www.wordpress.org, and in between the mean replies (“you don’t know what you’re talking about”), I found some good advice: the problem was with my plug-ins. I deleted all of the plug-ins I wasn’t using and tried again. Success! It looked like this (sorry, no longer available).

But it turned out I wasn’t done. A couple days later, I wanted to work on the page, and this time, no login page came up. I got access to the password protected page without a password. Now I had the opposite problem. If I didn’t fix this, a student could have access to another student’s private information, which would be bad, bad, bad.

Setting a Password’s Expiration Time
Some more research on www.wordpress.org revealed that WordPress keeps passwords as cookies for a standard 10 days. That’s a long time for someone else to log in to see your information.

Some of the suggestions to fix this problem were ridiculous. One person said, Just eliminate your cookies when you close out of your browser. That’s clearly not what a student or parent is going to do.

But finally, I figured it out. You can change the amount of time your site remembers its cookies. If you go to your FTP client (mine is FileZilla), you can edit your wp-pass.php file to set your cookie expiration. The time is in seconds, so the default is 864000. I changed mine to 1800, or 30 minutes.

I was nervous to go to my FTP program; a long time ago, I deleted my entire site. But I was careful, found the file, saw the line of code, and made my edits.

I was thinking of setting it lower — and I still might — but 30 minutes seems like a reasonable amount of time. I want to guard against other students getting access, but I also don’t want to make a student type in his or her password in the same session. I’ll see how it works.

I’m pretty happy with the results. Now I just have to repeat this process for my 16 other advisees. I’m pretty sure they’ll appreciate the work, and so will their parents, who will no longer feel like they’re bothering me with questions about their child’s community service. favicon

teaching

Starting a student tech club on campus

Posted on by Mark Isero

faviconOne of my dreams is having a technology club on campus, but so far, I haven’t found the spark among students.

Starting anything new at my school is difficult. You would think a small school would make things easier. The opposite is true: When there are only 300 students,  getting even 10 students together is a major undertaking.

It doesn’t help that the stereotype of “young techie” doesn’t exactly match up with the stereotype of “urban youth.”

But the need is obvious. The interest, I believe, is just under the surface.

Recent breakthrough
Last week, a young woman approached me and asked, “Can I start a tech club?” This is the same girl I pitched the idea to a year ago. (See, it takes time.) Last year, she wanted to found the club so that students could practice their keyboarding skills using Mavis Beacon. (No, that’s not exactly what I hoping, but you have to start somewhere.)

I was happy to see her excitement, so I got her a club request form, which requires five students as founding members.

Today, she came up to me again. “I need one more, Mr. Isero. Can you help me?” We’re close. And now I have a homework assignment. Maybe this year, the student technology club will get off the ground, Mavis Beacon or not. favicon

(Note: Please, if you have ideas for how to grow the club, let me know in the comments. Thank you.)

teaching

How to add an MLA header to a Google Doc

Posted on by Mark Isero

Google DocsfaviconOne of the worst things about Google Docs is that the header is useless for students because pagination does not work.

Update, September 2011: At long last, Google Docs now has pagination! This means that it’s now possible to do a correct MLA header. But it’s available only on regular Google Docs, not Apps. This means teachers and students will have to wait a little longer.

Unlike Microsoft Word, you can’t tell the computer to display the current page number. This means that students can’t follow MLA format.

Good thing I just found a tip from Google Operating System. There’s a bit of html code you can add at the top of your document to make your header work perfectly.

You just have to click on “Edit HTML” under the “Edit” menu. (Update: This applies only to the old version of Google Docs. Please see comment below.)

The problem is, the code offered by Google Operating System is not in proper MLA format. So I changed it. Here is the new and improved version (that includes my last name).

<div style=”text-align: right;” class=”google_header”>  Isero <span class=”google_pagenumber”>1</span></div>

Now I’m wondering if it’s worth it to show this to my students and teach them how to insert this code (with their last name) into their Google Doc. Maybe it’s just too tedious. On the other hand, it might be nice to teach them a little html and the importance of getting things perfectly formatted when turning in a formal essay. favicon

teaching

5 reasons Diigo is better than Google Sidewiki

Posted on by Mark Isero

faviconYesterday, Google announced Sidewiki, which allows people to comment directly on web pages for others to see.

It’s a neat concept. It makes the Internet more interactive, and readers before you can add helpful information to navigate the site.

Some teachers have noticed the similarities between Sidewiki and Diigo, a popular social annotation application. Will Sidewiki, with Google’s backing, replace Diigo’s strength among educators?

No way. Here are five reasons why:

1. Diigo’s highlighting feature is much better. Many teachers use Diigo to help students improve their reading strategies by having them highlight passages and write sticky notes to interact with the text. With Sidewiki, you can highlight a passage, but once you make a comment, it gets mixed up with all the rest of the comments. Diigo’s comments stay connected to their corresponding passage.

2. Diigo helps students with research. With Diigo’s bookmarking feature, students can learn how to gather online resources, organize and evaluate them, and guard against plagiarism. Teachers can share recommended websites to the whole class for an assignment or research project. Sidewiki doesn’t do research.

3. Diigo is as easy as Sidewiki to use. Some people are saying that logging in and requiring a toolbar makes Diigo too cumbersome for students. Sure, getting students used to Diigo does take some start-up time. But the same thing goes for Sidewiki, which requires Google Toolbar and logging in.

4. Diigo allows for better privacy. Google is all about publishing everything to the whole world. Although I don’t have a problem with this, many schools do. Diigo isn’t perfect when it comes to privacy, but there is a teacher module that allows you to determine who is in your class and whether students can create their own profiles.

5. Diigo’s sticky notes are better than Sidewiki’s. Google will use an algorithm, similar to its search feature, to determine which user comments will stay on the page and which ones will drop to the bottom. This, of course, is not helpful when it comes to students’ sticky notes. With Diigo, all comments are kept in exactly the same place the user intended. In short, Diigo gives a much more accurate view of how students interact with a website, which can improve teaching and learning. favicon