The Tech Curve: April 2013

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.

www.LearningModule.com

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

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:

https://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GettingStarted

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

Bulk CSV Creator Template

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.