Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Tech Sherpas - Using Lego MindStorms in the Classroom

This hosts this week were Keith and Kern.



The question covered this week: 

 "How do you use Lego Mind Storms in the classroom?"






Links:

 itsvms7.blospot.com











We will be back Tuesday, May 21st at 3:00 EST
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Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Tech Sherpas - Collecting videos with YouTube and Digitizing Elementary Students Work.

This hosts this week were Jacob and Kern.

The two questions covered this week: 

 "Can I set a YouTube playlist up so 
anyone can upload to it?"

"How do you digitize elementary students work."

Examples of Students Digitizing their own work


We will be back Tuesday, May 14th at 3:00 EST
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Wednesday, May 01, 2013

A Spoon is not a Fork.

This hosts this week are Jared and Chandler.


The question covered this week: 
"What do you think of the proposal for Maine's 1to1 laptop initiative?"

This weekend the Maine Department of Education announced the next device for the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.(MLTI) The MLTI program has operated since 2002 and offered Apple devices to 7th and 8th grade students across the state of Maine. This year for the first time the DOE has gone with Windows PC, the HP ProBook.  Here is the full article in the Portland Press Herald.

We discuss some of the implications of this shift for students, teachers and the state at large. It's important to note that as of the latest information, districts will still have the option of buying into the other hardware choices (iPads and MacAirs) if they foot the cost of the difference.


My personal feelings is that I know it matters what platform you use, but less and less than ever. If the web is your production platform, then the devices just become the conduit to your content. That said, there is undoubtably a trade off. There are local programs and features that do not have the equivalent in cloud services yet. A spoon for soup and fork for spaghetti. But that's changing, and all the major players know it. Microsoft's latest version of Office saves your files in their Skydrive (cloud storage) BY DEFAULT. That's a huge shift in functionality and assumptions about users. One of drawbacks of this is how each company is building their own digital fiefdom, and not playing well with others.
iCloud vs. Google vs. Skydrive vs. Dropbox, etc.

We don't want them to build these artificial digital ecosystems where you have to choose one closed garden over the other (think AOL circa 2005.) Facebook is pushing this, they are the one service to rule them all, the difference is there's no cost to changing social networks. Hardware costs money and all the apps we buy for them will not transfer. Right now when I buy music, I buy it on Amazon which downloads a copy to iTunes which syncs with Google Music. Yes, I now have the song in each service, but it's quite a Rube Goldberg way of accomplishing this.

Hopefully it will get better.
Spork anyone?

We will be back Tuesday, May 7th at 3:00 EST
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Friday, April 26, 2013

LearningModule.com

This hosts this week are Olivia and Carter.



The question covered this week: 
"How do you prepare students for online learning?"

This week on the Tech Sherpa Show we discuss the online course I created that our middle school students take to prepare them for the high school. The site is www.learningmodule.com and it is a Google Site template that anyone is welcome to take a copy of and adapt for their own needs.



The purpose of the site is twofold,
  • First, for students to prepare the new Google Apps account they will be using in the high school. They subscribe to school calendars, organize their Google Drive folders and take a copy of our Student Portfolio. All in preparation for our digital portfolio system. 
  • Second, the students have experienced learning purely online. There is no class time set aside for students to complete the mini-course. There are 5 tasks, though none of them are particularly arduous. The point is for them to complete school work, (without a teacher prompting them over their shoulder.) Also, there are a handful of technology skills embedded in the task. For example, watching a short video and recording a response. This is not a difficult task, but in completing it, the students have shown they can reflect, digitize that reflection and hand it in.
We will be back Tuesday, April 30th at 3:00 EST
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Monday, April 22, 2013

Managing Bulk Users with Google Apps for Education

If you are the administrator for Google Apps for Education you're probably thinking ahead about the  upcoming summer break and might be wondering what you're going to do about your student accounts. If you want to pause student access to their account for the summer, the easiest way is to simply reset the password. There are a couple ways to accomplish this, if you're into command lines and enabling APIs a great resource is GAM or Google Apps Manager. You can find GAM here:

But, if you're looking for a more straight forward method you can update all user passwords at once with Bulk Uploader.

1) Login in as an Administrator of the Google Apps Domain.

2) Retrieve a CSV file of all your users by copying and pasting this link into the browser:

 http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/DOMAIN.ORG/DownloadUserData/UserData-DOMAIN.ORG-20130405.csv

and replacing DOMAIN .ORG with your own Google Apps domain address. Once you have the CSV file  upload it into a Google Spreadsheet. This file can be sorted or filtered if you only want to reset certain users.  The final spreadsheet should only have these column headers:

Username | First Name | Last Name | Password

By replacing the password column with one that you set. Then, click File and select Download as .csv file.


3) Go back to the Google Apps for Education Dashboard. Click the Users tab and select More actions - Bulk upload users. 

Make sure you check Update existing accounts so passwords will be reset. You can also force users to reset their password after they have logged in.



There are Third Party Apps in the Marketplace that will help with some of this process. One is Flash Panel which is free and helps with user management as well as other features.  Also, if you are looking for an easier way to sort, filter and manage the users, click the link for a copy of the


that I use to collect the users accounts, sort them and change the password in a click. I then download the sorted, filtered CSV tab at the bottom.

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Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Tech Sherpa Show - Backing Up Google Data

This hosts this weeks are Chandler and Jon.


The question covered this week: 
"How do you back up your Google data?"


RESOURCES
 Tools for individuals to backup: 
       Google.com/takeout
Tools for Domain level backup:
     Google Vault
     Backupify.com
Mail Archiva (Gmail only)





We will be back Tuesday, April 9th at 3:00 EST
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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Tech Sherpas - March 26th

This hosts this weeks are Jared and Brock.


The question covered this week: 

  • "Do you know of any screen recording Chrome Extensions or websites for screen recording on Chrome books? The lack of Java and Shockwave have my class set somewhat limited. Want students to create screen casts."
  • "How do I edit video using YouTube Video Editor?"

We will be back Tuesday, April 2nd at 3:00 EST

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