Classroomtech.org.uk

Google Docs is an online office suite, like a cut down version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). It runs in your web browser and stores your documents online making them available from any computer. Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate on and share Text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

There are lots of applications for Google Docs in the classroom and I will discuss others in future posts. One application of the word processor part of Google Docs is to create quick and temporary web pages.

Because the word processor enables you to quickly edit documents with instructions and links you can write some instructions or information for a lesson just as you would on a worksheet, except that because you can publish it as a web page it can include links to other websites.

When you have finished your page, you can publish it (go to ‘share’, ‘publish as webpage’) and you will be given a link to your new web page. Here is one I created for this post:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbtbm3h_52c747dtgd

This is now a webpage that you can send the students to in order to guide them through an online task. You can use a URL shortener as detailed in another post to make the address easier to share with the pupils. When I ran the above address through Memurl.com I got memurl.com/duvote which is much easier.

When you have finished using the page with a class you can either leave it published or unpublish it, but save it in Google Docs. That way you can come back to it, ammend it and use it again.

For more information about Google Docs visit the website docs.google.com. I will endevour to write about Google Docs in more detail soon.

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…)

The URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the address of a webpage, for example the URL for this site’s homepage is classroomtech.org.uk.

Not all websites or web pages have such snappy and easy to remember addresses. Try telling students (or expecting them to type) addresses like http://www.members.aol.com/ukhostmths/mathson/maths/shape/curve/curve1.htm or even worse random addresses like the ones you get for published documents from Google Docs, e.g. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgtxdb9p_0dcpmz8gq.

Obviously in a classroom these are difficult to communicate to students and can lead to problems with typing errors when students try to enter them. One solution is to use one of the many URL shortening services. These work by taking the original address you are interested in and generating a shorter address that is easier to remember and communicate. This short address permanently forwards to the original address, so once you have shortened one you don’t have to do it again and the new short address will take you straight to the site you want.

(Read the rest of this entry…)