A school, just like a home, must be able to provide safety and security such that learning may take place without hindrance. One of the areas of concern for most educationists is the security of the learners. Learning in the 21st century requires students to collaborate and use technology in their learning among other dimensions too. Emails are a great tool for effective and formal digital communication at school and failure to enforce some security or code of conduct may end up making students vulnerable to some cyber criminal activities. To make use of all Gmail applications, the teachers and students must have an email they use. Fortunately, Google mail has some features that would require to be looked at and ensure the students' safety.
Some pundits may argue that students must never have access to emails at school and proponents of the usage of digital tools think that this thought is retrogressive and of the yesteryears. The digital world is here for everyone and instead of resisting it, we must embrace it and use it to enhance teaching and learning. The following blog post is going to look at some ideas on how one may make use of the inbuilt features of Google mail to enhance the safety of learners. Google apps for education has some inbuilt features and tools that make it possible to provide a safe working environment for teachers and students.
Organisational Units (OU)
In the Google admin console, organisational units must be created and have units according to the organisation's functional area. All students must have sub-units where there are lower primary, upper primary, and lower and upper secondary units. Organisational units are important in ensuring that certain permission is given to a certain group of individuals.
Some configurations to consider.
1. Emails are to be limited to certain individuals in the organisation. Senior students may have their emails barred from sending an email to younger students.
2. Restricting communication from outside the organisation. Emails for students must be restricted from emailing outside the school organisation. This enables them to be safe from spamming, phishing or hacking. The school may white list some domains for example if it is a sister school for collaboration purposes.
3. Bad word list- The bad word list can be enabled to quarantine, reject or modify any email that may contain words deemed bad.
4. Blocking students from sending emails to email distribution lists ensures that students do not send bad things to their peers.
5. Google vault- this can be used to retrieve and search emails from any user, especially where there may be allegations of misuse or cyber-criminal activities.
6. Email forwarding to personal accounts may be disabled too.
All these rules may be adjusted to different grades differently. Thanks to the OU feature in the google admin console. Stricter organisational rules enable the safety of our children from the marauding criminals whose modus operandi has now shifted to online.
Of all Google's applications, youtube is one of the most widely used web video streaming applications. According to Global media insight, in 2022 youtube had a whopping 2.6 billion users. Any teacher who has never used youtube in his or her lessons is probably using the condemned rot method of teaching. One major issue that I had to always deal with is having to put a video in my presentation and in cases where I had to show the students a section of the video , I would end up playing parts that would not be part of my presentation. If you have been in the same boat with me , the solution is here. In this blog, I am going to share with you how to clip a youtube video such that you only play the desired parts of it.
When you have a video you want to put in a presentation and you just want a certain part of the video, the process of doing this is very easy.
You just have to open the video you have chosen and go to the bottom and you see the clip option.
When you select the Clip option you will the new menu where you must give a title to your video first. Then you must adjust your video to show what time range you need to watch by trimming the video either going to the left or right. Click on share the clip and you have the option to send the video to social media or copy the link.
A browser is a software designed to open websites. You cannot get into a website without having a browser first. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and opera are the most popular browsers. Security and privacy need to be enhanced for a safe browsing exoperience . There are cyber criminals on the prowl and would seize every slightest possible opportunity to pounce on you. Here I am going to write of the settings you must do on your chrome browser to enhance privacy and security while browsing.
1. Site permissions
Some websites may access your camera, location, and microphone and this may jeopardize your privacy.
Go to settings/privacy and security/site settings.
You will then see a radio button and check on don't allow sites to see my location. It is here where you will also see the other sites that have permission to see your location. Check if you are not being tracked by any website.
2. Secure DNS and Connections.
Using secure connections will help you not to connect to sites that can scam you. To enhance this you go to settings/privacy and security/security and then turn on always use secure connections then turn on always use secure DNS.
3. Pop-Ups and Redirects
Most websites have annoying pop-ups and redirect you to other websites. If this happens you may be redirected to a site that has security issues. Therefore disabling these pop-ups is recommended for safe browsing. To disable pop-ups go to settings/privacy and security/site settings then Don't allow sites to send pop-ups or use redirects.
4. Third-party cookies
Several times you see a message prompting you to accept cookies whenever you are browsing. It is advisable to n]block third-party cookies. Cookies will make your browsing history known by third parties and they are used to track your interests which enables you to streamline the kind of adverts you may watch online.
settings/privacy and security /cookies and other site data.
5. Enhanced protection
You may need to utilize all of the chrome's protection features by going to settings/security / then turning on Enhanced protection.
6. Safety check
You can also check for bad extensions and password breaches from your dashboard. You do this by going to settings/privacy and security / then click check now.
7. Background apps.
By default, chrome runs all its apps in the background even if you are not active. This needs to be disabled such that you may have control over what is happening.
Do this by going to settings/system then turn off and continue background running.
By the end of an academic year, it is prudent for a teacher to archive his or her classes in Google classroom to ensure that the students do not have access to them. Here l am going to show you how to do the process easily.
You simply go to the home page in your google classroom and choose the class you want to archive. Look for the three dots that you will see if you let your mouse pointer hover on your classroom.
Select the three dots on the class you intend to archive
After that, you will find an option written archive and you simply click it.
Select archive
There will be an option archive again and you select that. Your class would have been archived and the students will no longer have access to it.
In case you need to use the material from an archived class in the future, here is what you do. Go to the top main menu to the left and click. If you scroll down the menu there will be an option written Archived class and you select that. You will then find all the classes that you archived. Hover your mouse pointer on the three dots again and then select Restore and another pop-up menu comes and you select restore again.
The 21st-century student has a lot of technological issues to cope with and it will be naive for a teacher to ignore the fact that the educational environment is fast changing. The students' social, psychological, and physical development is heavily influenced by their everyday usage of electronic gadgets and anything deviating from this would probably make their learning boring. The presence of electronic gadgets and computers can either be beneficial or detrimental to education in this digital era.
A 21st-century teacher would need to fuse in what these students like and experience every day, in the teaching and learning processes such that the students may find learning fun and engaging. In his book entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed(1968), Paulo Freire spoke of a banking concept in education that every educationist must endeavor to avoid and gaming can be beneficial in ensuring that learning objectives are achieved in a very exciting way. Our students are now interested more in computer games as compared to yesteryears when they would go out and play soccer and other games with family members and friends. Their friends are now in the virtual world and instead of living in denial and trying to force them to revert to the yesteryear methods of learning, educationists must be dynamic and adapt their way of teaching to the environmental, sociological, political, and technological 21st-century dictates.
Quizziz is a web-based application where the teacher creates an account and then has the option of making his/her own quiz or just selecting from the existing library of quizzes created by other teachers. Besides quizzes, slides may also be created that may be fused with quiz too to make them interactive and engaging. The teacher can make the quiz be teacher-paced or student-paced depending on preferences. The student-paced mode makes students be able to go back to the questions that they might have not answered well and redo them correctly.
There is another option of giving the students the quiz as an assignment. In the end, the teacher gets a detailed report which shows which questions would have been failed and the overall performance of students.
Quizziz has now introduced a paper mode. The teacher simply prints the codes and installs a quizziz application on their mobile phone and then displays the questions using a projector. The students will raise the cards with the letter corresponding to the answer on top. The teacher will then scan the answers whose QR code is captured and go to the next question using the mobile phone.
Blooket is also one of the interactive games that my students enjoy a lot. The teacher has to also create an account and then either create the lessons or just choose from the library by going to the discovery option. The teacher will then use a keyword to search for the lesson he or she wants. After this, the teacher will have to choose the game mode he wants. My students have liked Crypto hack a lot. The fishing frenzy and battle royale have also proven popular with the students. There are options to make the games timed or points /collections-based.
Nearpod is what I would call a packed site whose versatility is quite amazing. The teacher can make slides for presentations only, have an interactive whiteboard, and add pdfs for students to read. This is a teaching tool that has everything that one needs. The simulations make the lessons very engaging etc. It has several activities like polls, fill-in blanks, time to climb, and so on. One needs to create an account and then enjoy the privileges of Nearpod. The free library has professionally made neared lessons and activities that would engage the students.
Minecraft is a subscription-based application from Microsoft and has different worlds that students can choose to solve problems. It is a very good tool for collaborations and has tonnes of activities. Games can be personalized to cater for the students' environment. While students can have individual accounts a Microsoft for education account would be ideal to use Minecraft education.
This is what students see every day and they enjoy it.
This is mostly ideal for primary school students at a lower level. The site has plenty of activities for the teacher. All subjects are catered for. These include reading, writing, spelling, puzzles, clicking games, and several activities. The free site has a lot of adverts and may be an ugly thing, especially when dealing with students. Toy theatre is highly recommended.
With centimeter, you just need to create your account and then enjoy the free components of this tool. If you subscribe to it you will be able to get more game options. There is an option for presentations where you will be able to see all the presentations that you created previously. The templates on the navigation menu enable you to choose different types and modes of your interactive games. This tool s very useful for both assessment and teaching.
Kahoot is a favorite of many teachers and students because it is very easy to use. The free version has some basic games while the paid ones come in with more options. There are many fake websites on Kahoot on the internet. Kahoot has a library of other teachers' work and the teacher can enjoy them for free. A teacher may also make his/her own quiz. Kahoot reports give you a detailed insight into what the students have done.
Word wall (https://wordwall.net), just like the others mentioned above is a very effective tool that students love a lot. When you sign up you will have a choice to make your own lessons as well as get templates from the community library. It has matches up, puzzles, balloon pop, jumbled words, group sports activities, and so on. The interactive games are very useful in all subjects and this tool may be very useful for most teachers.
Pear deck is both a web-based application and an add-on you can use with google slides to ensure that your lessons are engaging. With Peardeck, students are given a code that makes them be able to join the teacher's slides and make the lessons run smoothly. Peardeck makes students annotate, and choose answers among a host of other engaging choices during the teaching and learning process. When you are using google workspace for education your admin may disable the installation of some add-ons. There are several ways of circumventing this but talking to your workspace administrator is the most ethical thing to do.
GoFormative also known as Formative, is a web-based tool that makes teachers create digital formative assessments, tasks, or assignments that are easily accessible from any electronic device: laptop, tablet, or smartphone. A teacher may create his own task or activity or may make use of the pre-created stuff found in the library. This tool can be useful in all subjects across the curriculum. The paid version offers more capabilities as compared to the unpaid one.
By
Bothwell
[ I am an educational technology enthusiast and currently enrolled as a Ph.D. in Educational Technology with the University of Central Michigan. Besides being a math and computer science graduate, I am also a Microsoft and Google level 1 and 2 certified educator as well as trainer. With so many certifications in a wide range of applications, my passion for education has seen me being a fan of the 21st-century educational dimensions which are a must for any serious educator. ]
You can now use familiar keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + C (or ⌘ + C on Mac), Ctrl + X, and Ctrl + V to copy, cut, and paste Google Drive files in your Chrome browser. This saves you time by allowing you to copy one or more files and move them to new locations in Drive, and across multiple tabs, with fewer clicks.
Additionally, a link to the file and its title will also be captured when copying a file, which allows you to easily paste them into a document or an email.
To help you more easily organize files in multiple locations without necessarily creating duplicate files, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + Shift + V will create shortcuts.
Lastly, you can open files or folders in a new tab using Ctrl+Enter, so that you can easily view multiple files at once, or use different tabs to more easily organize files between two different folder locations.
These are the new features from Google docs that are worthy of trying.
1. TABLE TEMPLATES
Google docs have been upgraded to include table templates and drop-down chips. These are two new enhancements for a flexible and smart canvas for collaboration. This is found in the insert tab and then select table. The table has another drop-down menu with templates and an option for customization.
Go to the insert tab then as usual you look for the table option and the drop-down arrow leads you to table templates that have :
The product roadmap, review tracker, projects assets, and launch content creator.
The product roadmap template has a table that has a project, status, related fields, and as table headings. The status has the drop-down menu already plugged in for you. However, if you click on add/edit options you can customize the options.
2. DROP DOWN MENU
You can also create drop-down menus! Wow! This is useful in cloze passages or exercises. Students choose an option from a given set of answers.
Let's look at the passage on prepositions below :
Last Saturday my mother had a big surprise for my sister and I. We went visiting the amusement park! Excitedly we packed our lunches and hopped into the car. Mother drove along the freeway and across town towards our destination. Finally, we arrived at Thrills and Chills Amusement park. We almost started running in a different direction! Mom told us it was important to stay together. We took turns deciding on rides. Fortunately, my favourite ride was right by my sister's favourite rollercoaster. We rode the rollercoasters bumper cars and racing boats together. At the end of the day we were exhausted from all the fun we all had. We pretended we were flying over rollercoaster tracks on the way home. I had a wonderful time with my family.
You may want your students to choose the correct prepositions from a list in the drop-down menu.
Let's copy the passage we want into our google docs. Let's highlight and copy and paste all our prepositions at the bottom and probably give them a subheading word bank as shown below.
Now we can use an add-on called doc tools to arrange the prepositions in alphabetical order. Install the add-on and after installation select all your words and look for the add-on from extensions or add-on and select it. Now check on sort the selection ascending. Your words will now be in ascending order alphabetically. We may need our students to cancel out every preposition that they would have selected so we look for checkboxes in our ribbon and the words will now have checkboxes.
Let's go to the insert menu and select the drop-down option. We will see that we have + New Drop-down, Launch status, and other preset Drop-downs. Let's select new Drop-down. On the template name, let's give it the name Prepositions . The first option 1 could be an instruction your students may want to have, for example you can write ________ or select or choose . Let's write the first word from our options on option 2. You can just copy and paste. After option 4 if you still have more options to add , then select + New Option.
You must now click save and you will be done.
Then you can just go to the next gap and repeat the process but before you insert new options you will see , "saved drop down list", and select it.
