Sharing with Google Docs

Carol B asked me to advice regarding sharing documents from Blackboard. Currently, when she shares the documents available on Blackboard, she clicks on the link in class to be sure that the students understand where to get the information. This results in the documents being downloaded to her desktop - however, she doesn't need them and has to delete them again after class.

Once all our students have accounts through Google, we can all use Google Docs to share documents via external links that will not result in unnecessary downloads; the students can download or print from Google Docs.

Here is an example below from the ED466 Blackboard site:

1. First log into Google Docs and upload the document.

2. After the upload, click on "Share" and then "Share with others" (see image below):

3. Send an invitation to yourself to gain the link to post on Blackboard.

4. Google will email you the link to use on Blackboad (see below)
5. Back on Blackboard, add an "External Link" for the document you'd like to share with students. From Google Docs, they will be able to view, print or download as needed.


Try out the link on Blackboard if you have access to ED466 (Go to "ED411 Work Continued...") - if you don't have access, email me and we can arrange temporary access for UAF faculty.

Cool trick with Blackboard Gradebook

I love the color in the gradebook! Brilliant!

Back to School and Something New with Google Docs...

This week, I invited my ED411 students to view a .pdf document that was quite large. Because of it's size, I decided to use Google Docs and when I used the students' @uaf.edu addresses to invite them to view the document, a new area of Google presented itself.

It seems that uaf.edu has a special Google place...did you know about this? https://www.google.com/a/uaf.edu How is this better than using regular Google?

Summer ED626 Literature Blog

This summer, the ED626 (Teaching Reading and Writing) class for post-bacs worked with a blog to share the children's literature we read and shared in class. The students will also post their final 55-book presentation of all the children's literature they reviewed this summer. The blog worked well for this activity as now the students can come back here during the year when they are looking for literature to share with their elementary students. They can also just browse each other's presentations for enjoyment.

Check it out at http://ed626sum08.blogspot.com/

Startup Disk is Full????

Do you remember that portable hard drive that Skip provided to us through the Rich Media money? Boy, I'm glad I had it today. As I was working, my computer presented me with this ominous message. What? My disk is full???
I pulled out the portable hard drive and starting moving files. I moved mostly picture and movie files and my disk space grew from less than 1 GB to over 7 GB...whew! I didn't lose anything...what would have happened if I ignored the problem??? (not that I would EVER ignore warning messages from my computer...)

Land Line or No Land Line?

We think we are ready to drop the land line for our telephones....has anyone else made the change?

This green phone is one of my prized possessions...friends who moved away from Alaska passed it on to me....I love the retro dial and showing my kids what phones were like when I was little. I still remember what a big deal those new-fangled push button phones were when they came out and were more to "rent" from the phone company....Does anyone remember that we didn't buy phones, we rented the phones??? I was thrilled that it still worked when I received it! But now, this phone will finally be obsolete as a phone. This is the first thing from my childhood that is kaput...I am officially "old!"

Paying for the land line doesn't seem to make sense anymore. The one concern I have is when we leave our kiddos home alone...we're not ready to get cell phones for them as they aren't yet teenagers. We may get a third "house" cell phone for when the kiddos are home alone...we're moving into a new world.....

Web 2.0 means???

Skip sent us the article above this week to review. Throughout the article, the authors referred to "Web 2.o applications." What was Web 1.0? How is it different from Web 2.0?