Google Apps Ideas

Since joining the "sandbox" group (out of the goodness of the CIT folks hearts) I have been thinking about ways to integrate google tools into learning/collaborative activities. I have previously required learners in my course to create and maintain a blog as a part of the course expectations. I have learned a great deal from these graduate students as they share their ideas, experiences and discoveries via this medium. More than likely I will continue this practice in courses that lend themselves to this form of communication.

A newer collaboration for me has been to co-write a grant application using Google Docs. Some collective reflections from this process I plan to share with the "sandbox" group during the last session.

I also am in the process of designing a guest class presentation in colleague's classroom next week and have decided to create and publish my plans through Google docs for the class participants. I may decide to publish a survey before class to get a sense of the participants knowledge and interest around several of the topics. The survey will most likely be created using another tool than Google.

The final idea for this posting is that I would like to see if there is interest among faculty in the College of Education to explore Google for Educators. If there is interest, this may turnout to be something similar to the "sandbox" experience we have been having these last several weeks.

EMail practices

After hearing Grover talk about gmail and how he is using this for all his email, I have decided to try this out for myself. I am a Macintosh user by preference and enjoy using Leopard's email client. I am in the process of testing:

• forwarding all my JMU email to my Google mail account. (I have consistently run out of space with my JMU account and hopefully this will allow me to keep email as long as I want to)
• I still wish to use the Leopard (Apple) email client so I am testing my configurations so that I can send mail either from my JMU address or from my Gmail account using this email client.
• I am unclear about where copies of my sent-mail messages go when I use my JMU account - I suspect these still remain on the JMU server (can anyone clarify this?). If this is the case I will most likely will have to move these over manually to my gmail account.
  

Well I will see how my email adventures go this week and then decide if this practice is worth continuing for me.