Empowering Students with Google Apps Education Edition

Google Apps for Education Help Page

To help the students and teachers at my school make the transition to Google Apps for Education Edition I set up a wiki help site that includes videos, handouts and links to Google help sites.



The site is located at:  http://eisenhowerms.pbworks.com


Sections of the site include:

• Google Apps Information
• Google Docs Information
• Using Documents
• Using Spreadsheets
• Using Presentations
• Using Forms 
• Gmail 
• Google Calendar
• Google Sites

Using Postini to Manage Gmail Accounts in Google Apps

Using Postini with Gmail

Limiting Gmail to your Google Apps for Education Domain Only
This handout will walk you through using Postini to set up your Google Apps Education domain so that email can only be sent to and from email addresses within your domain. If you are in a K-12 school this is a way to give your students email accounts to email teachers and fellow students only. You must activate Postini Services to do this.

Using Postini Sender Lists
If you have used Postini to set up your Apps Domain so that no one from outside your domain can send email to the Gmail addresses in your domain you may want to allow specific senders or senders from a specific domain to pass through the filter. In my district teachers have email accounts in another domain, wyckoffschools.org. I wanted my Apps Gmail users to be able to receive and send email to wyckoffschools.org. Also, if you have limited email to your domain only Google Calendar alerts will not get through your filter. This handout shows you how to allow Google Calendar alerts to pass through your filter.

Using Postini's Quarantine Feature
Postini gives you the ability to “quarantine” email. This means that if you create a filter to block email to or from specific email addresses or domains you can designate a person, or shared email address, to get a copy of the blocked email. You can also use Postini filters to block inappropriate language in the content of email coming from or going to your domain. Quarantining this email will help administrators easily identify students who are violating school email policy.

Great Moments in Art

Great Moments in Art is a calendar that uses Google Calendar to create a calendar of artist birthdays and other moments in art history. Since Google Calendar is linked to Google Maps including the artists' place of birth in the event listing will create a link to a map. Information about the artist appears in the description field. Google Calendar users may use the "copy to my calendar" feature to add the event to their calendar.

iTunesU

This is a short video with info on what is available at iTunesU. Info on how to use it is also available.http://tinyurl.com/6r6vxk

Poetry In Motion

I just posted a page from my NAEA session Poetry In Motion
http://www.olejarz.com/arted/digitalvideo/poetryinmotion07.html


Volunteers from the session were given lines from a poem to dramatize. The dramatizations were videotaped and transferred to iMovie. I demonstrated the process of editing the video and adding graphics, titles and credits. A QuickTime video of the performance is posted on the web.

DigitalHarold - E.A.T. - Education Art Technology

Unfortunately, been too busy to write but wanted to post the statement that I came up with about education and technology.

Using technology to demonstrate teaching and learning is the best way for educators to prove that they are using technology to enhance teaching and learning.

Charles Sheeler @ NGA

Last weekend I went to Washington DC. One of the shows that I saw was Charles Sheeler: Across Media. It was at the National Gallery of Art. The show runs from May 7th to August 27, 2006. The Sheeler show was especially interesting because it explored the relationship between Sheeler’s photography and his graphic work and paintings. Photography played a very critical role in Sheeler’s work. Interestingly enough, Sheeler’s dealer Edith Halpert, felt that his painting was much more important than his photography. She wanted to downplay the role that photography took in Sheeler’s paintings because, she feared, that if people knew about the photogaphs his paintings and graphic work would’t be taken seriously.

Sheeler studied at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia from 1900 to 1902. He then studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1909 he went to Paris and was exposed to Picasso and other European modernists. So Sheeler really started out as a painter. Sheeler go into photography around 1910 as a way to support his painting. He became friendly with the photographers Morton Schamberg and Paul Strand. In 1917 Sheeler and Morton Schamberg rented house in the Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Some of the photographs that Sheeler took in Doylestown were then turn into drawings and paintings. The Upstairs of 1938 and Interior with Stove of 1932 are examples of Sheeler’s painting and graphic works that are based on his photographs..

Something that I had not known and all was that around 1920 Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler made a movie called Manhatta. The 11 minute film was shown in London in 1927 and the was lost until the 1950s. The film is shown inthe exhibition. The movie starts out with a scene of people coming off the Staten Island Ferry and landing on Manhattan Island. Many of the images in the movie are reminiscent of photos that Sheeler and Strand had taken. The movie takes its title from a poem by Walt Whitman of the same name. Lines from the poem are used as caption for many of the scenes in the film.

The most remarkable work in the show is the Sheeler’s painting The Artist Looks at Nature from 1943. It is owned by the Art Institue of Chicago. The painting shows Sheeler sitting at an easel working on a drawing that is based on one of Sheeler’s photographs. As the brochure for the exhibition explains “The painting can be understood as autobiographical and records how his explorations across various media defined and complicated his artistic identity.”

No Family Left Behind Law

This is from Michael Winerip's NYT's column of July 12, 2006

"We need a No Family Left Behind Law. This would measure economic
growth of families and punish politicians in charge of states with
poor economic growth for minority families.

FOR example, in Ohio, black families earn only 62 percent of white
household income, one of the biggest disparities nationally. So every
year, under No Family Left Behind, Ohio would be expected to close
that income gap. If it failed to make adequate yearly progress for
black families' wealth, the governor and legislators would be judged
failing, and after five years, could be removed from office. This way
public schools wouldn't be the only institutions singled out for
failing poor children.

And if states succeeded in closing the economic gap, test scores would
be expected to rise, giving politicians and teachers a chance to
celebrate together."

I think that this is an idea that most teachers can get behind!

NECC, 2006 - Random Thoughts

The Read/Write Web, also referred to as Web 2.0, was a big part of the conference. Many sessions dealt with wikis, blogs and podcasts as easy ways for teachers and especially students to contribute content to the web. As Will Richardson put it, “A society of authors.” This was also said about the web not too long ago. The difference is that learning html or Dreamweaver requires lots of time while setting up a blog or a wiki on one of the many sites that offer them is relatively easy.

Many people were blogging the conference. I sat next to someone in one session who was typing right into her blog . She said everyone in her district who is at NECC is blogging the conference. This is one great way to create a district resource that teachers who did not attend the conference can use. Also, teachers who attended the conference have a blog to refer back if they forget something.

During one session the person sitting in front of me was looking at my blog during the session. I tapped her on the shoulder and said hello. Small world. In another session, I met a person who had emailed me about my blog the day before. The great thing about NECC is that the people who are using technology are at NECC using technology. There were laptops everywhere and the entire conference site offered free wifi access.

Some people were saying that educators should not take away the tools that kids are using at home when the come to school. The tools that they were referring to are cell phones, blogs and myspace pages. I believe it was Will Richardson who compared a myspace page to a beer commercial. He pointed out that there was the same amount of commercialism and sexual innuendo in the beer commercial as in the myspace page. The important thing is to teach students how to use these tools for educational purposes and publish responsibly.

In the exhibits area I was impressed by www.schoolweblockers.com. This company offers a web based file storage system for students and teachers. For about $1.00 per user in a school each student gets 100Mb of storage and teachers get 1Gb of storage. Students and teachers can take files that they are working on at school and upload them to the schoolweblockers.com server. When they get home the files can be downloaded to their home computer. This is a great way to give students and teachers the opportunity to store, access and transfer files at school or at home.

Answers.com had a booth at NECC and their website, http://www.answers.com/, is a useful research tool for k-12 students.