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Almost all online tools and web applications not to mention blogs require you to register an account or at least give an email address before you can use them fully. This causes a problem when you want to use one of these services with pupils and they either don’t have their own email addresses or you don’t want them to use their own addresses for whatever reason.

Google Mail provides one option to work around this. If you don’t know anything about Google Mail, it is one of a number of web applications that are provided by Google and are free to use. Google Mail is an email account and webmail program (a bit like hotmail or yahoo mail). Google Mail has several advantages including a large amount of storage space (several gigabytes) and advanced search and filtering capabilities, making it easy to find messages. It is free and straightforward to sign up for a Google Mail account and you can sign up for as many different accounts as you want.

Google Mail is useful in overcoming the requirement for lots of email accounts because once you have signed up for an email address, for example mrtdolan@googlemail.com, you then get more than just the user name ‘mrtdolan’. You can add a ‘+’ to the username and then anything after it and it will be delivered to the same account. So email sent to mrtdolan@googlemail.com, mrtdolan+one@googlemail.com and mrtdolan+two@googlemail.com would all end up in the same place. Although Google Mail treats these as the same account, anywhere else they would be considered different addresses and so could be used separately to sign up for a service multiple times.

For example, say you were setting up a class blog and you wanted each student to have their own login so you could keep track of who wrote what. You could set up a new google account (e.g. mrtdolan08yr10@googlemail.com) and then use varations on that address to sign all your pupils up to the blog, e.g. mrtdolan08yr10+bob@googlemail.com, mrtdolan08yr10+jane@googlemail.com, etc.

Obviously there are always issues to consider when using online tools with students where they have to register for accounts, but by following careful procedures, only using first names, not requiring them to use their own email and having clear rules and guidelines it is possible to make the most of some of the great tools out there.

You can find out more about Google Mail and sign up for an account at mail.google.co.uk

One of the best features of web browsers when they first became popular with start of the mass use of the Internet back in the 90s was the ability to save, or bookmark, favourite web sites. Making it easy to find them again. Bookmarks are still a major feature of all browsers and there have been various advances and additions that make them easier to use and more useful. The problem with the bookmarks in your browser, on your computer is that if you go to another computer or even use a different browser on your computer then you don’t have access to them.

Over the past few years services that solve this problem have sprung up on the Internet. They are websites where you can register and then bookmark web sites from any computer and access them from any computer. These services are called social bookmarking services. The name suggests one of their major features, the ability to share your bookmarks with other people (if you want to) and collaborate in building lists of useful web sites.

The biggest and probably best known of these sites is called Delicious.com (formally Del.icio.us). (Read the rest of this entry…)

As teachers we have to manage large amounts of data. There are lots of different ways to organise lesson planning and record keeping from paper based planners and mark books to computer based solutions. As more and more of us have a laptop on our desks all the time it becomes more practical to have our data stored electronically.

Some teachers use tools such as Google Calendar to organise their planning and spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) are popular for registers and marks. These are good solutions and have benefits like the ability to access your planning from anywhere if you use web based tools like Google Calendar. The down side is that while these are good solutions, they are separate and it is difficult to connect the different bits of data together.

A few years ago I went looking for a better solution for organising my planning and marking and came across a program called Teachers Personal Information Manager (TPIM) and I (and several of my colleagues) have been using it ever since. This program is written by a teacher and is based very much around the sort of information that teachers need to have to hand every day in the classroom.

(Read the rest of this entry…)