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By Rob, May 16, 2010 7:30 pm

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.

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By robert, May 5, 2010 6:00 pm

File sync programs can replace the carrying of USB flash drives.  You simply install the software on your home and work computers, and then when you change a file on one computer the file is copied into the cloud and changed on the other computers that are in the sync relationship.  This saves carrying an unreliable and old fashioned USB flash drive that you have to remember to back up.

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.

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By Rob, February 9, 2010 8:57 am

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).

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By robert, February 8, 2010 6:03 pm

I’m issued with an email account with Outlook Web Access (OWA) for my school email address (hosted by EMBC).  I don’t actually use it much – I prefer to use my Google Apps Gmail account as a client for my work address in preference to Outlook (which I just can’t make myself like) or the Outlook web interface.

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?