QuickTip: Gmail Aliases

Although Gmail doesn't offer traditional email aliases, you can easily use a kind of alias (alternate) email with your existing account. This is useful for sorting and directing messages.

For example, let's say I own the email serendipity@gmail.com but I want to use it with students in one of my courses. I don't want that course-related mail mixed in with the rest of the messages, so I tell students to email me at serendipity+353@gmail.com (352 being the course number, but I could have added media or any other characters). I will receive those messages sent in my regular mail and then I will set up filters in Gmail to automatically direct these messages to a folder for the course. I could also apply a label or star them, skip the inbox, or forward them to another email account or any other options offered in Gmail. It's a nice way to stay organized. For a small business, you could use aliases for different inquiries by adding +info, +estimate, +billing or any useful label to customize the message.


Etherpad

Etherpad is a web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants' edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author's text in their own color. EtherPad is an open source project.

You can quickly set up shared documents and it is fast enough that you can see what others are typing as they're typing it.

One possible negative is that the documents ("pads") aren't protected by a password, so anyone with a link to them can edit them. People immediately compare Etherpad to Google Docs.  EtherPad is probably better to use than Google Docs if you want to support anonymity and/or allowing people without Google accounts to participate.

Anyone can create a new collaborative "pad" and each pad will have its own URL. Anyone who has the URL can edit the pad and participate in the associated chats. Each articipant is identified by a color and a name. The software auto-saves the document at regular, short intervals, but participants can permanently save specific versions ("checkpoints") at any time. A "time slider" feature allows anyone to explore the history of the pad. The document can be downloaded in plain text, HTML, Open Document, Microsoft Word, or PDF format. There is also a chat box in the sidebar to allow meta communication.

Google Docs does not do real-time collaborative text editing, so it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change you make to show up on other people's screens. That doesn't sound very slow but as the Etherpad creators say, "Imagine if that was true for white boards or telephones." EtherPad (as in ethernet cable) does it in real time which might be important in working as a group.

Etherpad was first launched in November 2008 (as EtherPad) and the software was acquired by Google in December 2009 and released as open source later that month.


Reimagining Education in a One World Schoolhouse

I don't know if this is what School 2.0 will look like in the near future, but in The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, Salman Khan’s vision of the college of the near future doesn't look like the university of today.

Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a website which has gotten a lot of attention for offering free online video lectures about a variety of subjects. It started as a one-man operation on a no-budget and has grown and obtained major funding from places like The Gates Foundation.

This book takes his ideas much wider to how he sees the future of education. It builds off what he set out to do with Khan Academy. He is really talking School 2.0 (versus University 2.0) since he is intent on changing elementary and secondary schools more than higher education.

There is a chapter on “What College Could Be Like.” What does that college look like? In brief, it's a place where students spend most of their time working on internships and mentored projects and not in classrooms. Not that traditional educational approaches are gone, but much of that is self-paced learning on the Khan Academy model.

He sees ungraded evening seminars. "Faculty" are mostly professionals who act as mentors and guides along with a some professors who still teach theory, concepts and the knowledge base. The entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives that he sees working with students are more like the adjuncts who often teach now in professional schools. The lecture-based course is either eliminated or greatly reduced in number.

Although MOOCs are not really part of the book, some issues that those courses need to address are part of his plan. For example, he thinks that colleges can separate the teaching from the credentialing. He does not see students being graded in the way we grade now. His vision is more about compiling a portfolio of their work and of their assessments from their professors and mentors. But students will still need to have their learning progress validated by some institution.


Learning to Program and Code

At one time, teachers were concerned with teaching students how to use computers. I did lessons with middle school students back in that last century on how to turn on, log on, search the Web, and use applications. Now, students come to school with computer skills and perhaps even better skills than the teachers (depending on grade level) and access to more computers and devices at home than in school.

But one area that is still more the domain of the classroom is learning to write code. This doesn't mean trying to turn kids into programmers. Getting an introduction to programming not only gives you a sense of how computers work, but is also teaches math, logic and critical thinking.

Although computer science courses don't usually appear until high school or college, there are lots of ways of teaching younger students programming.

My sons both loved playing with LEGO blocks and that led me to buy them Lego Mindstorms which allowed them to do robotics building and programming. I did sit on the floor with them at first, but they were fine with just playing around and figuring out how to make things happen.

Lego Mindstorms’ kits have sensors and motors and use command-box programming rather than code programming. The LEGO-supplied language can be modified to work with third party languages. Mindstorms grew out of the work at the MIT Media Lab and you will find several other projects from there in the resources below.

These resources vary in level from things appropriate for most upper elementary students (like Scratch) to sites using more advanced languages such as C++ or Javascript. But, I would caution placing any level labels on the sites because a student who gets into programming can move quickly well beyond the basics and work above their perceived grade level.

  1. Alice - a free and open source 3D programming environment that can be used to teach students object-oriented and event-driven programming. You use drag and drop graphic tiles to animate an object and create a program. Storytelling Alice is an offshoot developed by Caitlin Kelleher at Carnegie Mellon University which emphasizes animations and social interactions and can help get kids interested in programming.

  2. C Programming - is a way to learn C and C++ programming

  3. ClassTools.net - allows teachers to create games, quizzes, activities using templates for a product that can then be embedded into a site

  4. Code Academy is a free site to learn to code for creating websites, games, and apps with step by step instructions - it also can track user progress.

  5. Code Avengers - teaches Javascript, has 40 short lessons with each having 5 tasks

  6. The Code Player - video tutorials to learn HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript

  7. Hackety Hack - open source application teaches the basics of programming in the Ruby language. The tutorial runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Unlike the popular Scratch and Alice which use a "simpler" graphical programming language with “blocks,” Hackety Hack teaches the basics of Ruby syntax.

  8. Gamestar Mechanic - a fun way to have students learn how to make games

  9. Google Blockly is another visual program editor using blocks of code

  10. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform with both hardware and software components. Arduino is a more advanced way of building things that actually move. It can be used to introduce programming and includes a modification of Scratch for simple programming using Arduino hardware. Google announced it would allow Android mobile devices to communicate with Arduino hardware, so this probably has a future for Android app development.

  11. Playfic - teaches programming through the use of Digital Storytelling by text based games

  12. Programr - has several programming languages that can be used online

  13. Scratch was developed by the MIT Media Lab as a visual programming language for children age 6 and up and it has 800,000+  users who have joined the Scratch website since 2007. They have shared over 1.7 million projects including games and animations. Scratch is free and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

  14. MIT App Inventor has educational resources from the creators of Scratch and teaches users how to create mobile apps.

  15. Stencyl can be used to make iOS and Flash-based games by putting blocks together

  16. What2Learn has both educational games and ways to create your own.