Phasing out MS Office

Our school has a history of using MS Office, as do many. It’s expected. It’s normal.

It’s expensive. It also, with the age group we teach (7-13 year olds), gives the kids too much flexibility to fiddle; they like to create pretty instead of content. And their idea of pretty really isn’t pretty!

So, I want to replace it with Google Apps. We’ve got a Google Apps domain, and this is the only thing I’ve been using in IT lessons for the last 12 months.

The time has come though, to just not install MS Office on pupil accessible computers. I’ll give them OpenOffice available as a just in case, but the default option will be Google Docs.

I’m considering turning off logins too; given that all the kids’ docs are going to be in the “cloud”, there’s not much point in logging in. They’ll authenticate to the web proxy so I’ll know who they are for naughtiness purposes, and I’ll give them the ability to connect to their home directory for saving other work, e.g. sketchup, audacity, etc.

I just hope it works – I reckon it’ll take a year before they’re completely happy with the move, but I also reckon I’ll be able to save nearly £5000 a year on licensing fees.

Time to get writing a whole bunch of documentation.

Use Google Squared as a Revision Guide

Google Squared is a search service that groups together related things, e.g. Conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot.

If you search for, say Sedimentary Rocks, Chemical Elements, Poetic Meter, it’ll go off and look for everything that might be related to that search and stick it in a “square” that shows the relationship between items.

Why not use it to build up a square for your current unit, then share the link with your pupils?

How? Go to http://google.com/squared

Tags: tip, tow, squared, google

Moodle -> gApps SSO Update

This last week I’ve managed to get all my groups from year 3 to year 6 signed up for our Google Apps domain, using the Moodle SSO to create the accounts.

Mostly, this has been a straightforward exercise, but every now and then, an account pops up that just won’t create in Google. If I go to the gApps control panel, and try to add the user manually, I get “the user already exists”, but it doesn’t appear in the user list.

Solution – GAM – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/

I can create the problem users in GAM, and suddenly everything works. How odd!

Some examples of GAM usages – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GAMExamples

Moodle, Mahara, Google Apps and SSO

This weekend, after much geeking, I managed to get our Moodle, Mahara and Google Apps for Education systems all talking to each other. Fortunately this is all fairly well documented on the web, so it was just a matter of following instructions.

What does this achieve?

My students can now login to Moodle, and once logged in, they have links in their sidebar (Blocks, as they’re really called in Moodle) which allow them to click through to Mahara and Google Docs WITHOUT HAVING TO LOGIN again. Even better, the SSO (Single Sign On) system automatically creates user accounts in Mahara and gApps if they don’t already exist for the user.

I know what Moodle is, but what’s Mahara?

Mahara is an e-portfolio system. I must admit to having completely dismissed it when I first read about it. I just didn’t get it.

But… Imagine each child you teach uploading the finished versions of their essays, projects, etc to their own webpage or portfolio, so that, at the end of the term/year/school, they have ALL their work collected together in one portfolio. Imagine other children or teachers being able to comment on and assess the work in that portfolio. Imagine being able to share that portfolio with the outside world, e.g. parents.

That’s what Mahara can do for you.

Why would I use Google Apps/Docs instead of Word?

Lots of reasons!

• It’s online – no more do students have to e-mail docs to themselves, or use USB sticks, etc.
• Collaboration – up to 10 students can work on a Google Document at the same time. Up to 50 can work on a spreadsheet. Each document has full revision history so that you can see exactly who contributed what. YOU could even collaborate on that doc with them – live marking, for example.
• Forms. Google Forms are absolute genius. Design a Form for gathering data using their friendly designer. That form is then published on the web, and any data entered into it is inserted into a row in a spreadsheet. All those ICT lessons where you wanted a dataset and had to contrive one are a thing of the past. Want to do a Geography survey? No problem. Want to do a poll of opinion about the quality of food at school? How about some AfL? All easily and beautifully handled by Forms. Check out Tom Barret’s 10 Google Forms for the Classroom at the bottom of this post for more ideas.
• Cost. It’s free, apart from the domain name (£10 a year?).

Yes, Word has more features. Yes, Word’ll let your kids generate prettier documents (and uglier ones too). But, to my mind, content is more important than “prettiness”. Collaboration is the new learning nirvana. Google Docs provides.

What do you need to get it going for yourself?

• Moodle install (ideally 1.9.5 or later)
• Mahara install
• Google Apps domain
• Administrator access to all the above
• Ability to upload files to the Moodle installation directory

The technical side of things is pretty straightforward – just remember to follow all the steps in the following guides to the letter.

Documentation:

Moodle/Mahara integration
Moodle/gApps SSO

Some tips:

1. Google Apps requires passwords to be 6+ characters. If your student passwords are shorter than this, then their accounts will not be created.
2. If you find that when you try to login to Google via Moodle, you get a “Invalid credentials” error, the chances are that you’ve not followed the instructions about certificate installation accurately.
3. When filling out the Google Apps SSO setup page, upload your certificate FIRST – those URLs that you’ve just typed in will disappear, so why duplicate the work?
4. Create local administrator accounts in both Mahara and Moodle just in case you mess up the authentication system – if you don’t have local (i.e. non-network authenticated) admin accounts, you could get locked out of your own systems!
5. If Mahara authentication stops working a few months down the line, check the expiry date on the SSO certificate. If it’s expired, copy and paste the key from Moodle into Mahara again. All fixed, hopefully!

So, what to do with your newly integrated apps?

Check out the following ideas:

Marking Work in Google Docs
10 Google Forms for the Classroom
21 Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the classroom
Using Mahara