Connecting With Your Students Using (primarily) Google Apps For Education

2014-05-20

As part of the A. C. Buehler Library's informational program for Reading Day Spring 2014, I demonstrated a set of tools, based on Google Apps For Education, that help faculty connect more easily, in a more organic manner, with students.  The purpose of this post is to make the recording and my notes public.  My speaking notes are minimal and will serve only to jog your memory if you were there, and to give you an idea of what was presented if you weren't.

These are my notes.

This is the Google Hangouts recording of my desktop.  I knock the microphone off the table twice!  Clumsy or animated - you be the judge.

If you would like further information or assistance in setting up some of the suggestions I make, please contact me at dave.basener AT net.elmhurst.edu.

New Zero-Day Exploit Targets Internet Explorer

(2014-04-28)

The United States Department of Homeland Security is warning Americans to not use Internet Explorer, until a fix is found and disseminated for a major security flaw that was discovered by the security firm, FireEye.  One assumes that other nationalities should be wary as well.

I will go further and state that you should never use Internet Explorer at all.  Part of the reason for this is that since Internet Explorer is based on proprietary, secret software, no one really knows what is going on in the product.  In this situation, as in others, Microsoft has known about the flaw and said nothing until the flaw was found and publicized by FireEye.  No one knows how long they have known and what they are doing about it.

Writing Your Own Websites With Google Drive

2014-04-11

Google Sites are great and let you easily create and maintain rich websites.  But what if you want your very own look and feel, don't want to be limited to Google's themes, or need to demonstrate skills for a class?  

Quick and Easy Tools From Google

Quick and Easy Tools From Google (2014-01-13)

We are back from the Holidays and extremely bad weather here in Elmhurst, Illinois.  I thought I would post a bit about the easy (read "nothing to install") tools available right from Google Search.

These will work for all browsers, but if you use Chrome, or set your browser's default search to be Google, they will all work from the address/search box directly.

You probably already know that if you put a location, whether the name of a business or an address into the address box, Google will show map and other location based services at the top of the search results.  However, there are other context sensitive results available.

New Research on Maximum Recommended Instructional Video Length

New Research on Maximum Recommended Instructional Video Length (2013-11-26)

I don't normally re-blog - this is the first time actually.  However, this new research from EdX and University of Rochester should just be presented in its original.  In a nutshell, rather than the "10 to 12, and not longer than 15, minutes", instructional video length that I have recommended in workshops, this research implies a much shorter length: 6 minutes.  In fact, while the average viewing time for a 6 minute video was 6 minutes, after that, the longer the video, the shorter the time that students watched.  12 - 15 minute videos were watched for less time than a 3 minute video!

https://www.edx.org/blog/optimal-video-length-student-engagement

Google Drops Support for Internet Explorer 9

Google Drops Support for Internet Explorer 9 (2013-11-11)

Google attempts to be browser agnostic in all of its standard Apps offerings so that all browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, on Windows and MocOS, work equally well¹.   In order to make this task manageable for these other browsers, Google limits the supported versions of those browsers to the current version and the next one previous².  

Google Maps as a Multi-Discipline Instruction Tool

Google Maps as a Multi-Discipline Instruction Tool (2013-10-04)

View The Amistad Slave Route & Revolt in a larger map
The ability to create your own content tied to a Google Map has always been ripe with promise for instruction in fields beyond Geography and Geology.  Tying the activity in novels, historically important events, political movements, migration patterns of animals and humans, changing climate data or anything else "mappable" to an interactive Google Map (or Google Earth) lets your students explore the topic in a way that a simple narrative restricts.