Drive-thru Weekend Take Out

Monitoring Gmail Labs
If you are a Gmail user, you would be doing yourself an enormous favor to check out the features at Gmail Labs. Among many other add-on features, Google now allows you to
* access your inbox offline.
*create a Google Document from an email.
*mark messages as read without reading them.
*undo "send" (five second delay).
*add a button that lets you send a reply and archive the conversation in a single action.
*insert images into an email.
....and much more.

The labs have been churning out new features like crazy. To stay abreast, I recommend that your subscribe to the Gmail Blog. It's the perfect blog, because the team only reports when it has something to say (Just like the Drive-thru?).

Using PowerSchool Comments Creatively
I’ve always disliked the programmed “comments” options that electronic grade books provide. Currently I use custom comments in PowerSchool, but often unconventionally. For example, I will use the comment section to log notes on participation or other classroom behavior. I may use the comments to indicate that a student didn’t bring notes for an open note quiz, or neglected to take advantage of an extra credit opportunity. Of course, I make plenty of positive comments to students, but recording some basic facts about shortcomings for my own records is very helpful at conferences with parents or counselors. They are less likely to float theories of how the teacher may be the cause of the student's under performance if the teacher has noted specific occasions where the student has been unprepared or distracted. I have found this documentation extremely helpful for "cutting to the chase."

Handy Storage at Box.net
At our school, teachers use Moodle to post files that students need for class. But when the students use Wikis or the teacher needs to host larger files than your Moodle administrator will allow, it’s nice to have another third party storage option. I’m a big fan of Box.net. They provide one gigabyte of file storage free (upgrades to larger storage options are reasonable). After an easy upload, the tools for embedding, sharing or downloading the files are highly intuitive. If you are a regular reader of the Drive-thru, you’ve come across more than a few hyperlinks to Box.net files.

P.S. The Drive-thru continues to publish on M,W,F for the rest of the school year.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Three Sweet Shortcuts

Need a Quick Rubric? Talented ed tech consultant Andy Mann showed me Rubistar, which is quite useful for whipping up a quick evaluation rubric for student work. It is preloaded with dozens of templates and categories. It is also fully customizable. In an hour I created three very different and detailed rubrics for my wiki project. While using Rubistar is not exactly intuitive, I have found my way around without the tutorials. (Here is an example: Peer wiki eval). Get your rubric right the first time if you can. Later edits are somewhat convoluted and very slow.

Labels for Gmail Like so many other things in life, I am slow to move toward a trend, but when I jump in I go head over heels. Such has been the case with Gmail. Despite the fact that my daughter and wife have been swearing by it for months, I only recently made it my main account. But when I commited to it, I decided to go through the entire Atomic Learning tutorial so that I would become aware of all of its nuances. I then discovered that many users don't realize how easy it is to "tag" one's mail with a label. I find that these labels are particularly useful for short term purposes. For example, when I was developing my staff development proposal I contacted several academics about their research. Five of them replied at various times and we began different levels of correspondence. By tagging each response with a label, I could bring up all the mail with a click whenever I worked on my proposal. This was much more efficient than the typical folder system.

Cross Platform To Do List. This tip is the most idiosyncratic, but it has been a major change in how I go about my daily business. For years, I faithfully carried a Franklin Planner through the work day. I'm a compulsive list maker and my planner kept me quite happy making daily list after daily list. But now Google Docs serves that purpose. I have created a Google Doc titled "To Do". This document is published to a url and I have tagged it with my most commonly used Delicious bookmarks. The bookmark then appears on my Firefox toolbar at home and at work, on my Macs and my HP. It updates through the day. It makes me oddly happy.

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"Shortcut" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Wagman 30

Back Channeling, Kindle, and Techy Tips

Techy Tips
This is a wonderful little scheme growing bigger by the day. The lessons are limited to single slides. If you are just sticking your toe in the Web 2.0 waters, what a great place to visit for some simple, yet worthwhile methods! If you have brief techy ideas to share, email a request to Mark Clarkson for editing privileges and add to a Google Docs collaboration that will only become richer as time goes on. (Be sure to check out Tip #23).

Using Twitter at Conferences
I've made considerable reference to Twitter in the Drive-thru. It is the main source of my professional reading. But if forming your own professional network of tweeters does not appeal to you, you should still sign up for an account before you head off to the next conference. Twitter is now commonly used for back channeling at professional gatherings, sometimes to the point of distraction. This is accomplished by means of "hashtags" which allow users to tweet about a conference with each other while it occurs. This may be conducted by channels officially established by conference organizers or simply by attendees. Michael Coté does a nice job describing this phenomenon.

Book End
I admit that I have been fascinated by Kindle -- Amazon's Wireless Reading Device -- ever since it was introduced. I couldn't justify purchasing one (now $359), because I am not a voracious reader and the device has rather limited functionality. But in Slate, editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg makes some remarkable statements about the latest iteration of the device. Weisberg asserts that "Kindle 2 signals . . . that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence. " I was surprised to learn that "Amazon . . .is selling most new books at a loss to get everyone hooked on the Kindle" and in the future " could become the only publisher a best-selling author needs." I recommend that you read the entire piece for more thought-provoking stuff like this.

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Screen capture of slide #1, "Techy Things for not so Techy Teachers".