The presentation below is a short recap on Google Apps for a group of English teachers. With a single student sign in, teachers can offer students a huge range of online tools.
Some of these are part of the Google Docs collection (Docs, Spreadsheets, Forms, Drawings and Presentations) and others are available under the wider Google umbrella. The Google Apps umbrella includes some of the following, all of which can be accessed with a GApps username and password.
Google Sites - build your own online learning environment.
Picasa is an awesome image sharing tool which just gets better and better.
Upload by email is a great feature, which is perfect if you want to allow an undetermined audience/group to submit images to you simply and easily.
First lets look at two ways to manage this.
If you haven't yet activated your Picasa account you'll need to that first, just Google 'picasa web', or click here, picasaweb.google.com/home to activate it with your school password.
Once in there you have 2 options...
Option 1
This is great if you want to ask a class of students to contribute an image/s to one album, or maybe parents to contribute photos they took on a school trip etc.
Create an album with a sample image in it, and share that with the students/parents who are participating, and tick the '' box, here:
Now they can just add images to that album themselves. This works better for a specific class, or grade or email group like Parents, not so much for a larger or undetermined audience, for that - you need option 2:
Option 2
This works well if the you don't know who the contributors are, or how many there are.
You can adjust the settings in your Picasa account to enable upload via email, this link explains it well, and I've included the text below to save you the stress of clicking:
Email upload
Use email upload to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums by sending them to a secret email address, especially useful from your mobile device. This allows you to stream and caption photos on-the-go. To get started, follow these steps:
Click the gear icon in the top-right corner and choose Photos settings.
On the General tab, in the "Upload photos by email" section, select the "Allow me to upload photos by email." checkbox.
Enter a "secret word," 6-15 characters long. As you enter this word, an email address appears.
Click the Save changes button.
To email upload your photos, just attach them to an email message and send it to the newly-created address.
Use the email "Subject" line to add captions or to include the photos in a specific album. If the email "Subject" line matches an existing online album title, your photos will be uploaded to that album. Otherwise the 'Subject' line will instead be added as a caption and the photos will be placed in the Drop Box album.
You can attach up to 20 MB of photos in JPG, GIF and PNG formats.
IMPORTANT! The participants will need to put their name in the SUBJECT of the email, if you want to know who sent the image... Or if you want the images to automatically go into an existing album.
I've set it up in my account so you can see how it works.
If you send an image to this email address it will automatically appear inside an album designated for that called 'Drop Box' nothing to do with THAT other web service. Or it will be added to an existing album if the subject matches the name of one of your existing albums.
If you want to move images out of the default 'Drop Box' album to another album, choose 'Organise' then 'Move' to move an image or 10 or so, to another album.
This is a nice video and collection of resources from the group Common Sense Media - iKeepSafe. The video would be a nice lesson starter about research and how to help students detect lies. There are some accompanying resources if you want to build a bigger lesson out of the idea.
This is a presentation about developing digital research skills in our students. This is something we have been trialling with our Grade 6 students and we have had lots of success. The accompanying poster covers the main points that we should be reinforcing with students when we guide students in completing research in class.
Lizzie Williams as Head of Middle School English has documented her work with some of the Grade 6 classes. She has highlighted the common issues that students face and has suggested some concrete teaching strategies to support you in the classroom. You can read her excellent overview here.
icon in the top-right corner and choose Photos settings.
