Thunder

If at present your school doesn’t have email or calendar functionality for all its staff and students then you might be interested in Google’s latest offering ‘Google Apps‘:

With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (Gmail, GoogleTalk and Google Calendar), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

It’s sounds good to me, I have been pleased with both their Gmail and Calendar services for the short while I have played with them.

Over the past few weeks I have had conversations with several headteachers in Shropshire about using blogs in the classroom.  One of the reasons for students using blogs is as an assessment tool, that instead of just the teacher commenting on their work they could post it to a blog and the ‘world’ could comment on it.  The big problem/spanner with this is how does the ‘world’ know about your blog to be able to comment on it?

This is an issue that Ewan has also noted in his article,  so if you have a couple of spare minutes could you pop over to aberNET blogs and leave a comment of two on the year 7 writing blogs.