Using ICT in Further Education

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Just completed a backup of our exams email account using Gmail Backup. Very easy to use and a great way of downloading copies of all the emails and, more importantly, the attachments!!

As this account is used to ‘collect’ exam work from our students, Gmail Backup provides a nice way to obtain a local copy of the files without having to download each one individually.

The work is, initially, uploaded to the email account using the Backup to Email software reviewed in a previous post.

It can be a little tedious identifying the individual emails, especially if you have lots, but each email is labelled with a code and the original date. A text file indexing the codes is also provided. Overall, Gmail Backup is a handy little utility.

Posterous is a super fast way to create and maintain a blog using email.  Came across this thanks to Horst Sievert.

The subject line of your email becomes the blog post title with the message text becoming the post text. But, it doesn’t stop there as Posterous lets your attach files (photos, MP3’s, documents, video), which are also placed in the body of your post.

If you attach more than one photo in the same message, Posterous automatically creates a very nice looking image gallery.

You can also insert URLs into your email message and these are added to your post as links, with a video link being converted to an embedded player. An RSS feed is included as standard. The only down side is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to tag posts.

It really couldn’t be easier. As I use email quite a bit I decided to set up a college blog with Posterous to use for posting notices for my classes during the year. The idea being that the students will add the RSS feed to their college personalised start page and can keep track of notices whenever they sign in.

Being a blog, it will also allow students to post comments about a notice if they have any queries or questions!

Be warned, it will probably be BLOCKED on your network – it is on ours!!! Apparently, Posterus is a no go area

But, all is not lost because Posterus also lets you autopost, via email, to some of your other services – blogs, twitter and flickr. So, you could set up a new edublogs blog, not blocked, which will receive all the ’email’ posts.

While this will work for text, urls and some ‘non blocked’ video links it is not the complete solution as the other content hosted on Posterus (images, audio) is still blocked and will not show up on the student network!

A much better solution is to see if your ‘education network manager’ will unblock your individual posterous blog. I recently asked for three of my blocked blogs to be unblocked and they all were

Thanks NCTE.

Previously, I would have sent notices directly to the students’ email addresses but I am interested in seeing if the whole RSS setup and commenting feature will work better. 

With 6GB of space provided with your Gmail account it seems a waste just to use this storage space for emails and attachments. Though, I am told this space is really for your Google Docs files and not just the emails!

Nevertheless, I have been testing two tools that allow you to access the space like a drive – so you can carry out all your normal file management functions using this space.

For all those still using Internet Explorer, GMail Drive is a third party addon which creates a virtual drive that appears on your computer and acts as any other installed hard-drive. You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive simply by using drag’n'drop like you do in Explorer.

When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it sends an e-mail to your account, which appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. It is a good idea to create a filter in Gmail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters in the subject) to an archived mail folder – so that the Inbox does not become cluttered up.

The latest version 1.0.12 is supposed to work with Google Apps accounts but I have not had any success in that area. Has anyone else???

For those using Firefox, there is GSpace, a Firefox extension, which turns your Gmail account into free online storage. With GSpace, you can store all types of files. Its simple, user friendly interface allows for all file management tasks to be carried out. GSpace is easily accessed from the ‘Tools’ menu within Firefox.

Both of the tools work perfectly – except with our hosted domain on Google Apps which is where I really wanted to use them, since my students all have college email addresses. 

Mind you, I’ve just had a thought, next year the students could create their own individual gmail accounts and then use one of these very useful tools