digitalgoonies.com

Some of the Web 2.0 tools we have discussed in this blog require you to register with a real email address. Some of you may have assigned email addresses for students, but many of us do not, particularly at the elementary level. Although there are some products out there that provide free email addresses for students (epals.com and gaggle.net as well as others), we have found a quick and easy method to manage this problem… piggy-backing on a gmail account!

Create a gmail account with a name you can share with students such as mrsjones@gmail.com. This probably isn’t the place to share your cutekitty@gmail.com account!

Students can then piggy-back off your account by adding anything after a + sign. For example:

mrsjones+student1@gmail.com
mrsjones+kate@gmail.com
mrsjones+booradley@gmail.com

Each of these will create a unique email address that the student can use to register for a Web 2.0 tool. The email will still go to your gmail account, but students will not be able to log into your gmail account, or ever actually receive any emails.

If the login requires you to click on a link to activate the account, you’ll still have to click on each of the emails sent. This may be a little time consuming if you have a lot of students, but you know you are keeping your students safe and allowing them to create cool projects that you might otherwise have to pass on!

OK, so it’s a ridiculous statement. But I guarantee that students think like this! Even my 10 year-old daughter gets caught up in this when her friends pass on email chain letters promising great fortunes. (By the way, I monitor her email using epals.com… that’s right, no privacy in my household!)

Students have a tough time discerning the validity of a website. Even for many adults this can be a real challenge!

I have created this lesson (Revised-Expand Your Horizons) to demonstrate for students that you can’t always believe everything you read. In short, students will form groups with each group investigating one of the following fake/hoax websites:

Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (save the endangered tree octopus)
Dog Island (send your dog away to eternal bliss to roam free and natural on this paradise island)
Lacuna Inc. (erase problem or painful memories)
Dream Tech International (human cloning- choose your DNA)
DHMO.org (research page for Dihydrogen Monoxide, better known as water)

The groups will research each of the sites using the sheet as a guide. They will then present their findings to the class, followed by a Q & A. What a bluff! Students fall for this all the time. It’s up to you when to let the cat out of the bag and discuss how to evaluate their findings. You might want to refer to Teaching Zack to Think, an article by Alan November. It’s an outdated article (1998) but has some great methods for evaluating websites for validity!

A few more fake/hoax sites to come soon!

I’ve discovered a few things as I transitioned from teaching in a traditional junior high classroom to teaching adults. One thing is that often my junior high students were better behaved! The other thing is that when they misbehaved I could assign consequences… with adults, not so much!

Teaching in a lab setting with either adults or students requires a little bit different classroom management. You have to be on your toes much more than in the classroom because with the internet, kids can get into places they shouldn’t with just a click of the mouse. Also, especially with older students, they are continually trying to find ways to “beat the system”, such as going around the filter with a proxy server. Continue reading

Many times in training we often tell people to look at the cursor on the screen. Often, the cursor is so small (and white) that it blends in with the application we are training on. To help remedy this, you can make your mouse “come alive” at the press of a key like this:

To accomplish this (on a PC):

1. Go to the control panel (Start –> Control Panel) and select the mouse properties. Continue reading

www.slydial.com

Admit it- there have been many times when you needed to deliver a message to someone (say a parent) but you really didn’t have time for a long drawn out conversation. You know- those times when you make that call and pray for voice mail or the answering machine instead of the potentially-volatile person on the other end. Yeah, we’ve all been there. And now, our prayers for getting the call to go to voice mail directly have been answered!

The folks over at SlyDial have made it easy! Just call the SlyDial number Continue reading

http://rubistar.4teachers.org

Grading student projects can be a time consuming and difficult job. I often had around 150 students, and I gave big projects four or five times a semester. That’s a lot of grading. I found that I tended to get easier on my grading as the evening wore on… maybe my standards would slide a bit after I saw the quality of the projects! I always gave the students a score sheet so they would have a way to know the way it would be graded. I called it a rubric, but it was really just a score sheet. If a certain criteria was worth 10 points, and the student’s project had issues, I would subjectively give them 7 or 8. If it had a lot of problems, maybe a 4 or 5. That’s not really a rubric.

A rubric specifies levels of performance expected for several levels of quality in order to earn a set amount of points. For example, if spelling and grammar are specified, the student would know exactly what is expected to earn a perfect score.

Continue reading

At Digital Goonies, we use Google Docs a lot to organize our book outlines, our workshop proposals, calendars, and a whole lot more! I can’t image how we got along before we started using Google Docs. Recently I needed a template for a spreadsheet that I was setting up, and decided to see if there was something available already that would keep me from recreating the wheel. I browsed through the template area of Google Docs.

Wow! There are so many templates there from financial spreadsheets to presentation templates to calendars. Continue reading

Most code from Web 2.0 sites goes into Google Earth without a problem. Scrapblog however isn’t one of those! Through a little trial and error (thanks Jim!), we have found a little simple modification will solve that problem.  When you paste in the code from the MySpace link, you have to substitute a little bit. Here’s the original code that I copied:

<object width=”420″ height=”312″ ><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer_v2_embed.swf?scrapblogId=1939247&showShareButton=true&showShareInitially=true&showOnlyShare=false&partnerId=1″ /></param><embed src=”http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer_v2_embed.swf?scrapblogId=1939247&showShareButton=true&showShareInitially=true&showOnlyShare=false&partnerId=1″ width=”420″ height=”312″></embed></object>

Replace the <object> tag (the bold text above) with this code