How does this sound…

• Organize your email more effectively
• Create shared calendars for your class assignments and events.
• Collaborate with others, online, on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets
• Deliver and collect surveys, quizzes, and feedback

(excerpt from Google Apps for education….)

Fairport teachers can do this very easily now with their new laptops.   Fairport has what is called Google Apps for Education….we call it Fairport Apps.  These apps are a collection of suite of web-based applications.  The most popular app is an email which ends with @fairport.org…..so for example, my email account is  bapthorpe at fairport.org.  Last year a group of K-12 Fairport teachers and students used Fairport Apps for the year and have overwhelmingly recommended them to be available to their colleagues.  Check out their feedback on an earlier blog posting.

For you to get your Fairport Apps account, simply email the HelpDesk or call  421-2043 or 19-002.

Check out these links for additional information.

Google Apps Training Center

Lesson Plan Ideas

Youtube Video on Google Docs (an example of a Fairport App)

For teachers who want to use their accounts with their students, we are starting off with grades 9-12 students.  These students will only be able to use their @fairport.org account with other @fairport.org accounts.  So in this respect it is only an email account that can be used internally.  We will evaluate this usage and decide whether or not to expand to the lower grades in the future.

Colorado, Iowa, Oregon and Maryland now provides this to all of their students and teachers K-12….8 million students…

Which of the following is most  likely to true?

1. All my students and I  have a PC at home with Microsoft Office 2003 and Windows XP.
2. All my students and I have a Macintosh with Microsoft Office 2007.
3. All my students and I have a PC with Microsoft Office 2010 and Windows 7.
4. All my students and I can access the Internet.

My guess is that #4 is your answer…..and is why student writing,  presentations, collaborations, group projects is now taking place in the cloud in schools all over the world.  Today students and teachers working in the cloud no longer have to worry about whether students have a PC or MAC, Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, or 2010….rather all they need is an Internet connection.  When RIT conducted a survey of our school community 3 years ago, as part of their cyber-security research, they reported that 96% of our students have high speed Internet at home.

Teachers and students now will do their work in the cloud…presentations, create documents, spreadsheets…all of it in the cloud.

What is the cloud, you might ask? Well take 4 minutes and listen to this 4 minute podcast done by National Public Radio as to what it is. The bottom-line is students and teachers can access their materials on any device, computer or phone, that can reach the Internet.

Cloud Computing Video in Plain English

The Future of Education is in the Cloud

Check out our previous blog entries for resources in the cloud that you can use immediately:

You ought to be in pictures….

More instructional tools for our teaching repertoire…

JP Teachers invite all students to the table of learning…

Before

Today

Hit these two keys at the same time to lock your computer.

A number of our teacher colleagues have asked my advice on using their laptops safely outside of the school network.

Here are four simple rules to follow

1. Only the teacher should use the laptop to ensure that the computer is being used appropriately. Almost always the troubles involving school laptops occurs when someone other than a teacher uses the laptop.
2. Always hit the Windows-L keys when getting up from the laptop as this automatically locks the laptop. Only a  username and password will open it up.
3. Use school laptops strictly for school related work. We encourage teachers to experiment with new technologies and the many new web tools we have available for teachers.  Do not use the school laptops for personal business such as Ebay or online gaming.
4. Keep username and password secret.

This new technology which tracks eye movements was created by researchers Ralf Biedert, Georg Buscher, and Andreas Dengal at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

Text 2.0 uses a camera and an infrared light to track movement across the screen. This information is applied to to conclude what the reader’s intentions are while reading. An article on e-schoolnews.com said Text 2.0 can show if a reader is, “… taking more time to read certain words, phrases, or names could trigger the appearance of sound effects, footnotes, translations, biographies, definitions, or animations.”

To see the vision of Text 2.0, watch the video on eschoolnews.com.

Atheros Computer Chip

In order to ensure that teachers and students have the best possible wireless experience for instruction we will have to prohibit any public devices from accessing the wireless network.  The reason is that wireless only performs as well as the lowest common denominator.  More specifically, the Cisco access points recognize specific wireless devices better than others.  Fairport teachers and students were purposefully given laptops and wireless devices that will provide the best performance….so let me use an example to illustrate the issue…

Say we open up the network and  a person brings in a Mac laptop.  They connect to the wireless network.  The person enjoys a relatively satisfactory level of connection….this laptop has an older Broadcom chip which talks to the wireless access point…the next room over has a teacher using 15 laptops with the her students.  They are using equipment with an Intel (Atheros) chip set designed to work with these access points.  These 15 laptops connects to the same access point as the 1 older Macintosh…the access points only need to identify the Intel (Atheros)  chip once, but has to re-identify the Macintosh chip evey single time it talks to the radio….this interrupts the communication to the 15 laptops and therefor causes them to have to re-identify themselves….bottom-line is the one Macintosh device inhibits the experience of the other 15…now I do not want to suggest this is a Mac issue, it is not, it is the type of chip set used in computers…

Internet cafes and libraries have open wirelee, but they are not required to provide quality of service….Fairport teachers and student require the very best technical experience possible and that is what we are going to do…..eventually we may turn on the 2.4 GHZ wireless for the public, but not soon.

I also have discovered humyo.com which is a site that allows to save up to 5GB on the web….so if your a teacher or student who has a files to move between school and home this would be a place they could store their files and access from either school or home.

Another tool is Prezi. As a teacher, I used Hyperstudio more than Powerpoint because I liked the multi-directional flexibility of Hyperstudio versus the linear flow of Powerpoint…..because teaching and learning is not always a linear process and we need to be flexible based upon the learning requirements of the students.  Prezi has is free for a basic account and for a premium account contact the HelpDesk.

The videos are on the Tech Services homepage as well as the TVT homepage.

Check them out!

• Get inside the games with Google
• Official Vancouver Olympic site
• Google Earth Olympic file (can be downloaded from this site)
• Winter Olympic Education resources