Tag Archives: Google Apps

Collaborative Writing using Google Apps (Google Docs)

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

google

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.