To set up, you download the client, install it, and log into your Google account or accounts. It lets you sync multiple Google accounts at the same time, so I can use it with my work Google account, my professional Google account, and my personal Google account. Insync creates a folder in your home directory called Insync, and creates a folder for each one of your accounts inside of it. Google Docs files show up as their Microsoft Office equivilents.

It works really well, just as well as Dropbox. There are a few annoyances, such as the inability to pause syncing (for example, if you’re on slow connection), but for the price it’s hard for Dropbox to beat.

One tip I would recommend is to create a folder inside your Google account folder and use that like you would use a Dropbox account. If your Google Docs account is anything like mine, you have a ton of files and very little organization. Since I’m using this basically as a Dropbox replacement, I created a folder called DesktopSync, and I use that like I would use my Dropbox.

If you are in a Google Apps for Education school district, your Google accounts work fine with Insync. I haven’t tested it on our client computers that students use yet. If it works there, it would be a very nice solution to file access outside of the district.

AJ Huff – Coordinator of school community public relations

The Senior Experience
- class

What
- 21st century teaching and learning
- language arts credit
- students apply, 6 students in class
- blog about their senior year.
- Also go to the other buildings
- They get a MacBook
- Digital camera this year
- Taught to be responsible with social media
- Real life experience. Work in the administration offices during class period

Student videos

The project is the 4 Cs.

Why did we need the senior experience?
- additional help
- Social media experience
- Main Street Madison – parent lead public forum. People were visiting it for information instead of going to the school’s website.

The plan:
- First year the students were hand picked for the pilot.
- Wanted it to be part of the main website
- want video and pictures in the blog
- promoting the seniors
- highlight videos

How is it evaluated
- Students are earning language arts credit
- students still have to take senior English
- problem based learning
- website hits
- a lot less misconceptions posted on main street Madison
- track top pages on site, blogs are consistently in the top 10

People do want to hear about the academics

Risks
- safety: signed aup, contract, loan agreement for equipment,
- Money: permanent improvement funds,
- Responsibility: AJ Huff

“Don’t be afraid to take risks, especially smart ones. ” – Steve Jobs

Q: did you have to turn people away the 2nd year?
A: received a list of 40 recommendations from the English dept. Widdowed it down to 20, then discussed with the principal. 12 were asked to apply, of which 10 did.

Q: comments are blocked on the blogs, what about the FB page?
A: FB page is new, but hopefully can turn negative comments to positive.

Q: Any plans to open it to others?
A: not at this time

Q: How did you come up with 6?
A: Original plan was they would be paired, because they work unsupervised in the office.

Q: How will you use Facebook?
A: Ultimate goal is to still drive traffic back to the website.

Q: How often do the students post?
A: In the beginning they tried 1 to 2 times a week, but that became an issue with all the other projects. Now it’s around once every 7-10 days.

Q: How do you handle their personal FB pages?
A: That’s really outside of the jurisdiction of the school.

Q: How much do you change their articles?
A: Quick edits, try not to change the message. Did have a problem with one post, student talked about the whole family going to Florida for spring break.

Q: Controversal issues in the school?
A: Situation hasn’t come up

photo credit: fifikins

A couple of months ago I decided to expand my use of Twitter, and began following more and more people in the education community. This was awesome, until I realized I could not keep up with the barrage of data that I was being given. In November I started brainstorming ideas on how to keep up. I noticed in any of my twitter clients that they were not grabbing all the tweets that had been posted from the last time I checked. The reason being is the API only gives you the last 200 tweets, and for me that was about 40 minutes worth.

My first course of action was to write some software that would grab the tweets from my @mr_rcollins timeline, parse the info and store it in a MySQL database. Besides pulling out the data I was interested in of each tweet, I also stored the complete tweet. This became impractical, since in a month the complete tweets themselves occupied 4.2GB! I stopped storing the complete tweets which left me with a 20MB database after a 5 weeks of collecting, which was a lot more manageable.

The next step was to start parsing the tweet’s text for urls, resolve any shortened urls, and dump them into another table for me to peruse. While I got that software working, I came across ReadTwit.com. This is a great service that will take your timeline, parse out the urls, resolve shortened links, and give you a RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader (I use Google Reader. Now I just go through Reader like normal, and am able to tag/star important sites that are posted to my Twitter timeline.

photo credit: ekurvine

Facebook has begun rolling out new settings for who can see your Facebook profile and what they can see on your profile. I suggest you double-check what is viewable about you. I try to keep my personal FB totally separate from my Facebook Page, so my profile is pretty much locked down. Over at Digital Inspiration they’ve written an article on How to Cross-Check Your Facebook Privacy Settings.

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Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done is setup a redirect from my website to point ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit!

One common question I see asked all the time is whether or not teachers should friend students on Facebook. Although you can set your privacy settings on Facebook to hide certain aspects of your life from groups of friends, this isn’t fool proof. Friending everyone including students and parents simply begins breaking down yet another wall between your professional life and personal life.

What you can do is create a Facebook Page for yourself. This gives you a presence on Facebook that can be used professionally which is totally separated from your person life.

“A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users. Create one in a few minutes with our simple interface.”

Unfortunately, your created page has a very unwieldy url. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ryan-Collins/181385642299. What I’ve done is setup a redirect from my website to point http://ryancollins.org/facebook to my Facebook Page. Be sure to become a friend when you visit!

Facebook Pages are not limited to people either, you could also create a Page for each class you teacher or other departments within your organization.

More information about creating a Facebook Page:

• How to: Create a Facebook Fan Page
• 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page
• How To Create and Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

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They also offer a private hosted version, but there isn’t any pricing available on the website.

Although some school districts will be wary of using a product that would allow their students to chat throughout the district, I think the advantages would outweigh these concerns.

Uses in the school include after hour editing assistance, a student could send the link to a document they’re working on to their teacher, and both can work on the document. Also, any group projects could use it for notes, planning, todo lists, etc., available to all the members of the group.

To get started, log into Google Docs and under the New button, one of the options is Form.

From there you can create your form. I only needed two pieces of information, their name and which class. For the user to enter their name I created the first item as a text field in which they would enter their name (and Google makes this easy for you since that’s what the first item defaults to. I did set it to be a required field though. For the class list I used a dropdown field. Each choice I labeled with the date of the class, the class title, and the time of the class. I didn’t go into great depths like a description of the class since that is emailed to the staff and available on the Technology Staff Development site in Moodle. Now the staff can easily sign up for classes, I can quickly find out how many people are in each class, and I can remove the class when the sign up deadline is past or when the class is full. The spreadsheet can also be used to take attendance.

The way the bot works is off of the emails that Twitter sends out when a Twitter account receives a notification of a new follower or a direct message. The requirements for the bot are:
• A twitter account (in this case it is etechohio09)
• An email account with POP3 access (in this case a gmail account is used. This email account address needs to be secret because there isn’t any checking on the validity of where an email came from so this would allow people without even a Twitter account to spam the bot)
• a unix based host with php at the command line (I use Ubuntu, but it should work in OS X)
• fetchmail also needs to be available

The process to set up the bot is as follows:
1. An email account is set up at gmail. This account must of pop3 turned on, which you can do from the gmail settings.
2. Create a Twitter account, using the above email account. In Twitter be sure to go to Settings -> Notices and have the notices for followers and direct messages checked.
3. Set up an account on the unix host for the bot.
4. Login to the account on the unix host.
5. Create the .fetchmailrc:

     nano -w .fetchmailrc

6. Enter the following lines to that file:

     set logfile /home/UNIXACCOUNT/fetchmail.log

     poll "pop.gmail.com" proto POP3 timeout 100 no uidl
     no envelope user "BOTACCOUNT@gmail.com"
     password "BOTPASSWORD" fetchlimit 100 ssl

7. Create the logfile:

     touch fetchmail.log

8. Create the .forward file:

     nano -w .forward

9. Enter the following line:

     |"/home/UNIXACCOUNT/twitterbot.php"

10. Download twitterbot.php, and make it executable:

     chmod +x twitterbot.php

11. Edit twitterbot.php and enter your Twitter username and password:

     nano twitterbot.php

12. Start up fetchmail in daemon mode and your bot should be functional.

     fetchmail -d 60

What will happen is that fetchmail will check the email account every 60 seconds. Any email will be downloaded and each message passed to twitterbot.php. twitterbot.php will examing the headers for the twitter command and then act accordingly. If it is a new follower, twitterbot will start following that person. If it is a direct message, twitterbot will then post that message to the bot’s timeline for all its followers to read.

The email class used for this twitterbot came from phpclasses.org, modified to pull out a few of the X-headers that Twitter adds so the bot can figure out the type of message and who is sending it.

A special program for web publishers, including bloggers, webmasters, and anyone who writes for the Internet. You get complimentary access to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online and, if you like, an easy way to give your readers background of the topics you write about with links to complete Britannica articles.

I don’t see anything in the FAQ about limiting access to educational institutions, but they do check any who is applying to see if they really have a blog and publish regularly (left up to them whether you qualify).

This free access is in no doubt related to the popularity of Wikipedia (for every page view on EB online, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia). I applaud their effort to stay relevant and to offer this ability to Internet users.

And what a great motivational tool to get teachers blogging!