Category Archives: Education
Student Email in the Classroom with Google Apps
A method for giving out email addresses to your students to use with various web technologies that require one to sign up (ex. Edmodo). This is the same method we use at the RETC to manage the kindle program, where each kindle has its own account that required an email address.
This method would be used on a teacher basis. It wouldn’t be handled by the administration. Each teacher would be responsible for their student’s email. (This could be used as an entire student population solution, but the ease and cheapness of the method fades away.)
The basic idea is simple, and one already used in the classroom. We are going to treat email addresses as another piece of school equipment. We loan them out, the same we would a book.
The email address that you give to students is only a name to use for web service. There is no inbox attached to it. They are essentially dummy accounts that are controlled by one master teacher account. Students can’t log into Gmail or any other mail service with their email, only the web services that you have them sign up for (Edmodo, Prezi, or whatever you chose to use).
For our kindle program we have 20 email addresses (kindle1@fordhamretc.com, kindle2@fordhamretc.com, etc…). These emails were used to create 20 accounts on Amazon so we can manage each kindle individually if needed. However, any emails that come to these addresses are sent to one master inbox. We don’t need to manage 20 different inboxes and 20 different amazon accounts.
Requirements
- A domain name. Cost $10/year if you are buying a new one. If you already have one you can use that (this won’t make any changes to a website you may be hosting)
- Google Apps. Free for up to 50 users/students
- An existing Google Account
For this walk through we are going to assume you don’t already have a domain and we will be setting up example.org as our class domain. Google already has some great documentation if you need to move your existing domain.
Buying the domain – First lets get our domain. We are going to buy it directly from Google Apps so everything will be set up and ready to go after purchase.
Once we find our domain (www.example.org) we click the “continue with registration” button.We are then prompted to enter our current Google Account information to make the domain purchase. (You are buying the domain for one year, you can delete or renew your domain after that.)
Congratulations, you’re now a domain owner (it’s kind of like owning real-estate on the Internet).
Setting up admin account – After we purchase the domain, we are asked to set up an admin account. This will be the account that manages everything in Google Apps. It cannot be deleted or changed, though you can add more admin accounts later. I am going to set up admin@example.org as my default administrative account and set a secure password.
Once we have an admin account we can begin to mange our account. Your main dashboard will look something like this.
Setting up groups – To set up and manage our groups we are going to the “Groups” tab at the top of the screen. As you can see I have already made a ground called ‘Contact.’ Any email that is sent to this group will be delivered right to my admin inbox.
We are going to set up your first group now. Click on “create a new group” located directly under the main navigation.
Setting up the groups will be the most tedious part of this method. You will need to set up each group individually and depending on how many students you have will effect how long this takes.
For our groups we are going to set up generic accounts for our students.
If you use a generic naming convention, this will only need to be done once. However, you can make your groups by whatever naming scheme you want, even based on the students’ names.
If you are the only user of this domain (groups, don’t count as users) you should check the box next to “Add all users within example.org to this group” at the bottom of the create a new group page. This will automatically add you at the owner of this group and deliver all emails to your inbox.
If you are not the only user, and need to customize who receives the emails, you can customize it on a person by person level in the group details section after you’ve created the group.
Once all of your groups are set up, you should have a screen looking something like this. Listing all of your groups by name.
Loaning Email Addresses – Now that everything is set up, it’s times to give the addresses out to the students. Each teacher may have their own system. All you are keeping track of is which student is assigned which email address. Since we are already using Google Apps, we can use a simple Google Doc on the same account to track everything. We create a spreadsheet in Google Docs looking something like this:
| Name | |
| Bruce Wayne | student1@example.org |
| Peter Parker | student2@example.org |
| etc… | etc… |
Now the students have these email address to sign up and use with all the great web technologies you want to use in your classroom. Students should only sign up for service the teacher approves of because confirmation emails for each service will be sent directly to the teacher. The teacher will know if the accounts are being used for outside school activity.
This method is cheap and easy to implement in a classroom setting. We just created an entire classrooms worth of custom student emails to be used, and it only took $10 and a short evening of work.
Microsoft Mathematics Now Free
Microsoft Mathematics (Windows Only) has been around for awhile, but never got a lot of popularity due to it costing money or being specifically bundled with other software. Now Microsoft is releasing it as a free, stand alone mathematics program.
Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 is made for math and science students from beginners all the way up to advanced and calculus level. It’s very intuitive and easy to use. I was able to start solving problems right away. The interface is made to mimic using a physical calculator. There is nothing special you need to learn about the program to begin working.
A brief list of features from the Microsoft website
- Step-by-Step Equation Solver
- Graphing calculator (2D and 3D support)
- Formulas and Equations Library
- Triangle Solver
- Unit Conversion tool
You are able to save your sessions and refer to them later. A great way to remember how you solved complex problems when studying or trying to do homework problems.
An interesting and useful feature is the Ink Handwriting recognition. More complex formulas can be drawn/written on the screen and the program will convert it into text for the computer to read. In my experience the program was able to understand just about everything I was trying to write, with only a couple snags. Seems pretty useful for those times you can’t find the way to format your equation for the calculator.
You can download the program for Windows XP and higher: Download
Are eBooks Cost Effective?
J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog, has a nice write-up about the cost of ebooks. As well as some of the pros and cons of buying ebooks. The excerpt below is a great little summary of when it’s a good idea to buy an ebook and when it’s still best to go with the old fashion paper book.
Here’s my assessment after two years of buying e-books:
- E-books are great for new releases. For new books, the electronic version is almost always the cheapest way to go. At a friend’s house the other day, I noticed he’d paid $29 for the latest John Grisham book. $29!!! That’s insane. That John Grisham book costs $16 at Amazon, and the Kindle version costs $10. In fact, most e-books cost between $10 and $12. When the cost savings is combined with the space savings, e-books are the clear winner for new releases.
- E-books are okay for classics. Anything that’s in the Public Domain (published before 1923) can generally be downloaded to your e-book reader for free. Sometimes the formatting is goofy, and there usually isn’t any supplemental material (like essays and notes), but you do get the books at no cost. (Searching for free Kindle books? Here’s Amazon’s list of free eBook collections, and here’s their best-sellers in the Kindle store, including free books on the right.) Of course, these books can usually be had for cheap (or free) in their dead tree versions, so there’s not a huge savings here.
- E-books suck for most titles published between 1923 and, say, 2008. Books from the past century are still priced between $5 and $10 in electronic editions. This is ridiculous. You can borrow these for free from your public library. Or you can go to a used bookstore, a garage sale, or a thrift store to pick them up for less than they cost in digital format. Plus, tons of popular books aren’t even available electronically. (A real-life, typical example: Cry, the Beloved Country costs $12 on the Kindle. A brand-new paperback copy from Amazon? $9. The mind boggles.)
If you remember, in a previous post I talked about the cost of ebooks between the different ebook stores, with Amazon coming out on top.
Why Amazon Is Winnng the Ebook War
In one word, Software. More specifically, Whispernet and Whispersync. Amazon’s own ways of keeping all your ebooks organized and accessible.
Accessibility
Amazon has created a quality and consistent user experience across multiple devices. Once you buy a book it travels with you, not you having to travel with the book. What do I mean by that? When you buy an ebook from Amazon, you are free to read that ebook on just about any device thanks to Whispersync technology. All of your bookmarks and notes will carry across multiple devices. Start reading on your Kindle, switch to you iPad, then to your desktop, and the entire time never lose your place. You are not limited by the device.
Compare that to Apple’s iBook Store. Anything purchased is confined to Apple’s closed network. You can read on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. That’s it.
It’s about more than just the device. When you get an ebook it should be accessible by any device you happen to be on. Formats should never be restricted by the device. Look at the entire music and movie industry with the DRM controversy. You’re buying a book to read, not a license to that book.
Management
Book management gets very important as you look at ebooks replacing traditional library collection in education. Students have to keep track of textbooks and research materials. Schools and Universities manage thousands of books for entire student populations.
Everything is manageable on the Amazon website. You can purchase books, push books to certain devices, push to multiple devices, and see every book in your digital library. This is ideal for the classroom, and the method the RETC used during the ‘Kindles in the Classroom’ experiment.
The RETC was able to purchase books from one master account and send a book to each Kindle device (18 devices in total). When the kids turned on their Kindle the next morning the book was ready to read. No handing out materials or keeping track of what students got what. Everything is done online in an easy to manage system.
Simplicity is what makes this management great. Amazon only wants to manage your books. It’s not trying to sync in with any other media or features. You can’t shop amazon.com, you aren’t streaming movies, and you aren’t syncing your music collection. It’s dealing with books and reading, that’s all.
Price
First, I’m going to speak from my personal experience. I have accounts with Amazon, iBook, and Barnes&Noble ebook stores. I’ve downloaded free books from all of them, but when it comes to paid books I always download from Amazon. Why? It’s always cheaper. The past five ebooks I’ve read have been purchased from Amazon. I searched the books on all three stores, and Amazon came up cheaper or equal every time. In one case, Amazon was the only store to even carry the book. This is by no means scientific data, but it’s a good observation.
Criteria for selecting the book prices in the chart below: Prices were taken from the websites of each respective store. The lowest price found was used. Prices were taking from September 15, 2010 – October 15, 2010. The list of books was compiled as a general representation of what a high school student would read. This chart and comparison should act as a rough guide, not hard facts to build your budget. For books to be included they had to be downloadable from the site, able to sync with all supported devices, and be formatted for each device, being able to use all the softwares features (i.e. searching, font-size, highlighting, notes, etc…).
*A note on Google Books: They are scanned copies of the original text. These books are free and are simply images of the original book on your device. They are not usually formatted e-books. Meaning you cannot change fonts, text-size, or manipulate the text in the normal way you would. Because of these limitations I can only recommend using Google Books for your personal reading, but not in a classroom or library setting.
Small Features, Big Impact
All the little things that Amazon adds to the software amounts to big functionality.
Book Recommendations – The system that helped make Amazon.com a success. Amazon has taken the same principles and applied it to the Kindle Store. Users are given recommendation for further reading on the same topic or genre. This is a plus for students who may have trouble finding books they enjoy reading. Once they find one, they will be able to find more through kindle recommendations.
Reading Lists – Being able to download samples of a book is a great way to keep a reading list right on your kindle software. You download the free sample of a book you want but aren’t ready to buy/read yet. Download as many samples as you want to create your list. When you finish your book you open the next sample you want to read. Read it, if you like it, you can download the entire book from within the software and continue reading. A tiny feature that can save you time, and save you from trying to remember all the books you wanted to read.
*I use this functionality constantly. If someone suggests a book to me, I’ll just download the sample right from the Kindle App on my iPhone. It’ll be on all my other devices next time I’m ready to read.
Lending books - Amazon recently announced that they will be adding the ability to lend ebooks to other kindle users. Once you buy a book, you can send a full copy of the book to another kindle user to read. Details are still scarce on how long the lending period will be or how many times you can lend a book, but this will certainly be a good addition to the Kindle functionality.
10 (more) iPad Apps for the Classroom
The first installment of ‘10 iPad Apps for the Classroom’ was popular enough, I decided to do a follow up. A lot more time and a lot more Apps have been developed for the iPad since the last article. I’ll highlight some of my favorites and most useful ones.
Frog Dissection ($4.99) – A digital interpretation of a classroom classic. I’ve covered this App once in an earlier review here. A recent update has added more information and data for students to explore. The App is nicely put together, very east to use and graphically sharp. Notes: no internet connection required.
EMD PTE – Periodic Table (Free) – In the previous article I noted Elements (14.99) as a great periodic table/science App. EMD PTE isn’t as feature rich but the price is right, free. This App provides good information on each element in a clean interface. The information doesn’t go much beyond what you would find in a typical classroom poster. Notes: universal app, no internet connection required.
Kindle Use at the University Level Takes a Step Backwards
College and University programs that promote using Kindles or like e-reading devices are being suspended by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education.
Recent complaints by the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind have sparked court settlements between the DOJ and the universities currently involved in programs promoting the use of e-readers in the classroom, specifically the Kindle DX. The Kindle DX has been viewed as discrimatory against blind students and violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. These programs are currently being suspended at 4 schools; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City, Reed College in Portland, Oregon and Arizona State University.
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10 iPad Apps for the Classroom
A follow up to The iPad and Education post. This is a quick list of 10 apps on the iPad that you can use with your students, most of which are free. The list is broken up into subjects; Math, English, Science, Social Studies, and Note Taking. If you have any app suggestions of your own, please leave a note in the comments.
Math
Quick Graph (free) – A complete graphic calculator application. Able to handle both 2D and 3D graphs. Input as many formulas as you want. A custom keyboard makes inputting easier. No need to go through the tedious Apple keyboard sub-menus to get to math functions (great for writing, not for math).
The iPad and Education
Since the iPad was first announced there has been a lot of talk about its uses for education. Specifically, the focus has been on college and university students. I would like to take a look at younger grades, elementary and middle school students. Students in these grades have not yet developed the way they take in data or their own study habits. These students would be more open to learning with new technologies and get a greater benefit. A student that grew up learning with technology will be more prepared in the future, rather than just giving them technology in college at the latter end of their academic career.
Kindle Tips and Tricks
Previously, I wrote a review called My Weekend With the Kindle 2. This is a follow up article, originally published on the Fordham RETC website.
At the RETC we have been running a program to use Kindles in the classroom. This article is to share some of the things we’ve found from researching and running this program.
The Kindle supports .txt .pdf .mobi and .azw (Amazon’s own file type). If you are downloading books from other sources, you want to use the .mobi format this is a popular ebook format. There are over 30,000 public domain and freely available ebooks that can be read on your Kindle. These books are all either past their copyright date or were put into the public domain by the author.
A selected list of free (public domain) books available. If you visit this page on your Kindle, you can download the books directly to your device.
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carrol
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales – Jocob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Works of Aristotle – Aristotle
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
- Beowulf (revised version)
- The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – Washington Irving
- The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
- The Call of the Wild – Jack London
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Macbeth – William Shakespeare
- Government Documents
Websites for downloading free or public domain books
Free Kindle Books – (the name should be pretty self explanatory). If you visit this website in your browser it will look pretty plain, but its formatted for the Kindle browser. You can download book directly from the website to your Kindle over 3G and they’ll show up right away. The site is nicely organized and the best way to find public domain books directly on your Kindle. And since the site is just for the Kindle, you don’t need to worry about downloading the wrong format, everything is made just for your e-reader.
Project Gutenberg – This is the largest collection of public domain ebooks. You can browse and download the ebooks directly from the website to your Kindle. The website is not as easy to navigate on the Kindle browser because it’s not formatted for the screen. Also this site is very large. It has ebooks in many different formats. You need to download the .mobi format for it to work on your Kindle. I recommend searching this site on your computer first to find the books you want, its much easier. You can then plug in your Kindle and transfer the books or go to the specific URL on your Kind’e and download it directly.
Feed Books – Describing itself as “a cloud service for digital publishing and distribution,” Feed Books is a very large and organized collection of public domain and self-published books that are available through a number of platforms. Feed Books can be accessed through the web, through your smart phone, or any other system with access to the internet. It’s not made specifically for the Kindle, as with Project Gutenberg, so you will need to make sure you download the correct format (.mobi) when getting books. Finding books through the website is great, its very easy to navigate and gives you suggestions for other books you may like.
Edu Kindle – this site is “designed to provide you with information and tools that will enhance your Kindle experience, especially for school executives, teaching professionals, school board members–anyone with an interest in teaching and learning with support from the Kindle.” It is a site full of resources and a great community of educators through their ning social network. They also have the Kindlepedia, a web app the will work on your Kindle browser to transform any Wikipedia article into an ebook for the Kindle. You can then take the article with you anywhere you go, and read it offline. This is great for longer articles that you want to refer to often but don’t want to go through the Kindle browser every time you need to read it. It’s fast and easy.
Some helpful good and bad things
The Kindle supports book annotations. You can highlight and save clippings or quotes from any book on your Kindle and they will be saved in a seperate document on your device. It will put the quoted text, what book its from, and the location in the book. This is nice for remembering a quick quote, but it shouldn’t be used for lengthy projects. The Kindle puts all your clippings from all your books into one file, and does not organize this file well. If you have many clippings from different books at once, it can be very overwhelming and difficult to navigate through. You have to go through the clippings document page by page.
The E-Ink screen, because of its static design, suffers from image burn (text being left on the screen even after switching pages). This will happen if you leave the same page up for an extended time. To fix this you need to refresh the screen by clicking Alt + G on your Kindle’s keyboard.
eBooks on the Kindle don’t have the same paging system as traditional books. You are given a location number and a progress bar as to how much of the book you have read. This makes it difficult if you were to assign pages of reading to students or want everyone to be on the same page during a class. There wasn’t a very uniformed way to do this.
You aren’t able to ‘flip though pages’ on eBooks. Skipping around, going back, or finding a certain page isn’t easy. Moving around more than a couple pages within your book can be somewhat difficult. The Kindle is really made to read books beginning to end and not stray much from this. For most books this isn’t a problem.
Text to Speech is still up for debate. This feature will let you have the Kindle read aloud. It will turn a written ebook to a book on tape. This could discourage reading in some ways, or help slower readers keep up with other students. Its you judgement call to how good or bad this feature is.
The battery life really does last as long as they say. It lasts for days. The only downside is when you have the 3G (wireless internet) on it will drain the battery, and there is no dedicated button to turn this on and off. Even if you turn the Kindle off, the 3G will still be running unless you turn it off in the settings menu. So even if your Kindle is just sitting there it will be draining battery. Without 3G on, the battery won’t drain when the Kindle is off.
5 Reasons College Students Should Have Blogs
Show You Have a Passion for Something- most jobs that you apply for want to know what you do beyond school in the field you want to work. A blog is a great way to show you have an interest in the work and have knowledge on current events
Stay Current- being in school you sometimes get detached from the world outside campus. By writing a blog and staying current you are forced to read news form outside of school and stay up to date with current events
Practice Writing and Communication Skills- depending on your major, outside of core classes you don’t take many English classes, or writing intensive classes. Its good to stay up to date with these skills as you will most likely need them in the future. Blogging allows you to practice putting ideas and thought into words that everyone can understand.
Showcase Your Work- give yourself an online presence. If you have good ideas or interesting things you’ve done, a blog provides a nice platform to share your ideas with anyone you want to.
Digital Extension of Your Resume- a “read more” button for your resume. You can show your resume in action, talk in more detail about items on your resume and show you really know what you are talking about. Blog about your experience and what you’ve learned from them, let people look at your blog after reading your resume to really get to know you.
*bonus* It’s free- Blogging is a free hobby and a free way to waste time/entertain yourself, which is important to the college student who is always low on cash.
Educational Technology Interview
For an entrepreneurship class, I am doing research into the educational technology market for a company to create. The market is in an interesting time, as it is very active yet very unorganized. Everyone seems to want technology and agree it is useful, but no one seems to know exactly how to use or implement it.
As part of my research I am doing three interviews. My first informational interview was with Marc, a 7th grade public school teacher and Renzulli workshop teacher. Marc using technology in his classroom for numerous tasks and teaches workshops for other teachers learning to use Renzulli, a popular educational software. Marc is a good person to interview since he has perspective of education technology from both the students and teachers.
First, I’ll focus on the students aspect of technology in the classroom. Marc’s school has about 75 computers for about 360 students (library desktops, computer lab, two laptop carts). The middle school age (6-8th grade) seemed to be the best place to really start using technology. The students are old enough to understand and use the technology, yet they aren’t advanced enough where they are set in their ways. For example introducing technology to a high school student can cause problems because the students knows how to use a computer and has their own tasks they like to use the computer before. It’s hard to change these habits. The habit of using technology for education needs to be introduced at a younger level, the middle school age.
Another interesting observation he made from the students perspective is that they were more productive with using the laptops in class rather than going to the computer lab. The kids enjoyed using the laptops more than the desktops and also were more productive in their class environment. I feel they were more productive in their class environment because that is their usually learning environment. The computer lab is more of a vacation from the classroom rather than a real learning environment. The kids also enjoy using the laptops, since they are simply laptops and seem a much cooler computer to use. Kids like using more cutting edge technology and don’t like using anything less than the best available at the school, which in this case is the laptop. The school also offers the use of jump (thumb, pocket, flash) drives for the students to transport their work between school and home. This is a good addition that the students seemed to take advantage of. For technology to really be useful an ease at which the students can use it needs to be created. Digital needs to work as well if not better than pen and paper work. This mean convenience of storage, transportation, and creation.
Next, we can talk about the use of technology from the teachers standpoint. In Marc’s school, every teacher is issued a laptop to use and is required to do certain things such as grading and attendance on the computer. Some teachers only use their computers for their required tasks and others for many other reasons. This is a problem from the teachers standpoint. There is no unity. All the teachers have varying skill levels with the technology and can utilize the uses in many different ways. Some of the teachers that are more set in their ways are reluctant to use technology and other teachers are more willing. The saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” comes to mind. Some teachers have been teaching for many years and feel no use for adding technology to their time tested teaching methods. If some of the teachers are reluctant to adopt the use of technology in the classroom how can one expect the students to use it. A unified example must be shown by the administration first.
An interesting side note I also found was that teachers and students were not allowed to add anything to the computers they were using. All the software that was on the computer at the start stays on the computer and no additional software is added. The software was a mix of proprietary and open source software. I understand why this is needed but more freedom in the use of software might enable more people to want to use technology in the classroom. I would have also liked to see a greater use of open source software, but that is my personal opinion. I feel open source allows for a greater variety and software and more customization to individual/classroom use.
Why The Asus Eee PC Shouldn’t Be Used By Schools
I’ve been using the Asus Eee PC in my college classes since Christmas and I’ve come to some interesting conclusions about the mini-computer. The computer is great for note taking and e-mail, which is all I really need in class. Its very portable and easier to carry around than notebooks. I’ve even begun to put what e-books I can on it, so all I need for class is the laptop.
However, with all this great convenience I can’t think of any application for the laptop in a full scale school system. A majority of students would only be frustrated by the computer in class. Most people don’t prefer typing over writing, and many people don’t have the computer and typing skills to take notes on their computer during class. And beyond note taking the computer doesn’t have many more useful class time features.
The mini laptop is a niche computer. It’s perfect for someone looking for a simple and cheap computer for class and not much else. It makes a great secondary computer and I highly recommend it for personal use, but not for a full scale introduction into the school system.