Getting All of Your Calendars Onto Your iOS Device?

More and more of my schools are using Google Calendars this year to manage staff events, PTA events, a meeting calendar, classroom daily agendas and more.  One strength of Google Calendars is the ability to keep a large number of non-related calendars connected to your main Google Calendar.

Often, this strength also becomes a problem.  Teachers that have a Google Calendar on the computer don't always see all of their calendars when they use a Calendar app on their iPhone or iPad.  There is a simple fix for this, but you have to comb through the internet to find it.  Luck you, I'm giving you the site right now!

Gigaom.com published a nice description of this process at  http://gigaom.com/apple/ipad-quick-tip-enabling-multiple-google-calendars/ . The secret ingredient is half way down the page in the paragraph about adding multiple calendars.  After you login to your gmail account, go to  www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect   and simply click on the calendars that you wish to show up on your mobile Google Calendar app.

Coming soon: How would you like to also see your Lotus Notes Calendar on your Google Calendar? Notes Traveler will soon be available to teachers in the district.  Stay tuned.

iPad Training With Science Teachers

I was asked to bring a special splash of iPad use to a group of Science teachers in AISD this Friday. The big goal for our just-under two hours together was for them to get their hands on the iPad and use it like students would use it in the classroom. Our focus will be to capture images, edit the images on the iPad, and share their work back with the teacher on a shared storage space online. The 'students' would then be able to access that same work using their laptop computer for further review or extended work.

The teachers will be playing the role of students as they try to identify the mystery trees in the school yard, research their findings via QR codes, edit their photos and post them online.  They will be using iPad apps: Skitch, DropBox, Scan, and hopefully PuppetPals.  All of the apps are free.

Teachers will be using this lesson plan outline:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1ZNefF4UMLmadCKUPoRyc4vYWRHw6bgEzt_kUDXhYZ5U


Flickr.com Creative Commons Photo Credit

Collaborating with Google Docs

Google Docs is gaining wider acceptance as a tool that students can use, but managing the work that students create still has a way to go for many teachers.  One of the biggest strengths of Google Docs is that it is a fantastic collaboration tool for the classroom.

In the video below, I quickly show how students can take any document and share it with other students.  Students can edit the same document simultaneously from anywhere.  Students can see previous revisions of the work and restore an old version if something went terribly wrong during a late night editing session.

Teachers can share with any student by using their studentlogin@stu.austinisd.org account.  Because the district connects the class roster system to Google Groups, the teacher can also share a document with the entire class by using just one class account.  Class account ID's start with the campus number, the teacher's E#, and the class period, followed by the special @crs.austinisd.org subdomain.

Sharing documents is easy and can allow for much less paper flowing across the classroom.

How would you use the Share button with your students? How do you have student collaborate on documents?

Sharing Google Docs With Your Class

Many users quickly learn to share documents via a users email address, but teachers in the Austin ISD Google domain can also very easily share documents with the entire class or single students.

When you are ready to share a document, click the Share button as you normally would in Google Docs. In the 'Add people' box, start typing the name of the person you wish to share the document with.

In the picture above, we typed 'john' and a list of names that contain 'john' automatically populate the share box. It is very important that our users carefully look at the domain after the @ sign before selecting a name.  The subdomain 'stu.austinisd.org' is only for students.  So, johnsmith@austinisd.org would be a teacher while johnsmith@stu.austinisd.org could only be a student.  Before sharing sensitive documents with other teachers, please check the address fully.

Another subdomain that we have is the 'crs.austinisd.org' domain that is reserved for class groups. Students accounts are automatically added into a crs group by the class scheduling system. Teachers do not need to create these group or manage the movement of students between classes or schools.

In this picture, we see that two different addresses have been selected to share this document with.  The first is a class account. These follow the format,  
CampusCode/Teacher'sE#/Period#@crs.austinisd.org .  Like the other addresses, the crs addresses will autopopulate as you type in this box.

You also have the ability to attach a message with this sharing process.  From this same picture, we see a teacher giving editing rights to an entire class and a specific student.  Students can use the Google 'File- Make a copy' menu to make their own editable copy that they can then save to a collection that the teacher has created for all students in that class.  Collections can be shared in the exact same way as above to help manage student document sharing with the teacher.

How would you use document sharing in your classroom?  Share!

Publishing From Google Docs

Most teachers know that Google Docs can be used to view, create, and edit documents online.  We can share those documents with others in a number of ways.  One of the easiest ways to share involves publishing the document as a webpage on the internet.

After creating your Google Doc (word doc, spreadsheet, or presentation), make sure you give is an appropriate name and give Google a few seconds to save the document.  To publish your doc, simply go to the File menu within Google Docs and select "Publish as HTML".

 

Publishing the document to the Web essentially just makes it viewable as a webpage while it remains in your Google Docs directory of files.  Publishing will give you both a document link that you can share with others or an embed code that can be added to a standard website page and viewed within that page.

 

Make sure that you check "Automatically republish.." so that you can continue to make changes to the original document and those changes will automatically be seen when viewing the original shared link. 

Publishing the document as HTML is great for when you are sharing a document with someone who doesn't have a Google Docs account.  The document is strictly a viewed webpage and any web browser can view it without having the user login to any account.   Teachers can use published documents as parent newsletters, instruction pages for students, an easy 'home page' for a classroom, and a great way to share a report with the world.  

How would you use this in your classroom?  Do you have an alternate way of easily publishing a document so that it is seen by anyone with basic web access?  Share!