Tag Archives: Google

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!

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

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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).

Visits from HSEvisit from the Houses of ParliamentVisits to my blog post from Microsoft/Google

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

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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.

cse1

Set up your search engine and enter a list of sites to search 

CSE2

Once your search engine is set up, follow these steps from the ‘Control panel’

 

CSE3

 

Pick a style and get the code to put on your website

CSE4

Copy and paste the code and then go to your site to embed it.  These pictures are from Google sites

CSE5  CSE6

Use these options to change where the search engine appears on the page, and the size of the search engine box.

CSE7CSE8

Save your page and the custom search engine is ready for use.

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!