Technology Learning Institute @JIS

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Image by Mark Brannan http://www.flickr.com/photos/23403402@N00/1197947341/

It’s been a humbling experience to be invited to Jakarta International School as a consultant for their Technology Learning Institute PD.  This is the second time JIS has conducted this kind of PD for their faculty – but this time, if teachers wanted to attend, they returned 3 days early from their Summer Break.  And quite a few of them did!

For the past 3 days, they have been taking part in technology PD sessions run by their incredibly talented team of team integrators/librarian/techie staff faculty members from across the Elementary, Middle and High schools.  From Moodle to iWorks to iLife to Blogs to Online Tools to PresentationZen – the attendees have had a plethora of sessions to choose from.  A flexible, adaptable schedule with time-out sessions added to process or work on something new, added up to a low stress (although overwhelming at times for those new to technology) fun-filled three days of learning.  It was an absolute pleasure and honour to have been a part of this experience and special thanks must go to Lindy B (who asked JIS to bring me in, because she’d been reading my blog!)

Special thanks too, to my awesome PLN who helped me with ideas for a couple of my sessions – your input, as always, is the reason twitter remains one of my favourite places for learning new things!

Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing links/presentations etc that I used with JIS.

Here’s the first:  Ten Online Tools to Kick Start the Year

 

Technology & Learning Coach – One Year On #1 Reflection

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Over the next few weeks I’ll be reflecting on my first year as ES Technology & Learning Coach for the International School of Bangkok.  It’s my first year out of the classroom after 14 wonderful years as a teacher of Year 2/3, then Year 7, and off course, two years as a Grade 5 teacher at ISB.

IMG_0025 One of my many favourite sessions with Grade 5 bloggers has to be our Beginning Blogging Sessions.  When classroom teachers decide that they want to blog (individual blogs) with their students, they can book me for 4-6 getting-started sessions.  These sessions go hand-in-hand with our Digital Literacy Unit for the start of the year.

Our Guiding Question:   What makes a quality post?

Investigate:

We used the “noisy round-robin” techniques to get all our ideas down on paper.

Noisy Round Robin Technique:
In groups of 4, brainstorm ideas for 1-2 minutes then pass your sheet of paper to the next table.
Rule 1: 1 person to read all responses to rest of group
Rule 2: Add more ideas/responses to the new sheet but DO NOT repeat what you have already added to the previous sheet/s.  Repeat process 3-6 times.  Groups then decide on top 2-4 ideas on their sheet.

Plan:

One person from each group reported back the top idea from the chart.  No repeats are allowed, so students had to listen to each other.  Everyone had to agree that the idea belonged on the master list of what makes a quality post?

Create:

Here’s what I was hoping they would come up with:

  • Make sure your work is the best it can be
  • Think before you post: Make sure what you write is appropriate to put online
  • Always tell the truth on your posts
  • Say what you mean, and mean what you say
  • Online work is NOT private. Never say anything on a blog that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the school bulletin board, or in the local newspaper
  • Get descriptive in your title. The title helps your audience decide if they want to read your post or not.
  • Try to link to other ideas or resources that back up the point you are trying to get across or further explain or enhance your content.
  • Is your post learning related?
  • Make your writing physically attractive. Add a supportive image, use bullets and paragraphs appropriately
  • Give credit in your works cited list to anyone whose work you use. Never use other people’s work and call it your own. In other words, don’t cut, copy, or plagiarize Internet content!
  • Share your knowledge with others; when you learn something new, pass it along to someone else who can benefit
  • Carefully proofread your online work before you post, just like you would a regular letter. Use good form, spelling and grammar
  • Capital letters are regarded as “SHOUTING.” Be careful with them
  • Don’t publicly criticize (or “flame”) others. Don’t be offensive, and don’t ever use bad language

Final List for “What Makes a Quality Post”:

  1. Don’t offend people (no swear words, insults, racist comments, and no discrimination).
  2. Add images, videos, and captions if necessary or if it is related to your writing.
  3. Be thoughtful when posting. Start with a good idea.
  4. Check your punctuation spelling and grammar! (Capital letters= shouting, so only use it when it is needed).
  5. Keep your personal information PRIVATE!
  6. Make your reader (audience) feel like you are talking to them.
  7. Always have a title. And be sure to make your title a hook.

What I’ve noticed is that when students help construct a list, they are more likely to understand the foundations of a good quality post – more so that just brainstorming a list together as a class.  It gives the teacher more of an idea of what the students are thinking about blogging already.

The “noisy round robin” technique is certainly that – noisy!  But I like it and I’m pretty sure the students do too.  Everyone has a voice, everyone can contribute and from others’ ideas grow more ideas!

 

Summer PD in the Comfort of Your Own Home

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The wonderful folks over at Edublogs have put together the best summer PD you could ever imagine  - they’ve organised the  Teacher Challenge: 23 Free Web Tools.  It’s part of the “30 days to using the best of the web’s free tools for educators” series.

Each of the 23 links below take you to an Edublogs Teacher Challenge page for a tool with an overview, a task & challenge plus help & support links.

What a perfect challenge for the summer if you’ve got time to dabble with this list of free web tools.  It will only take 30 days!  Some of them you will have heard of before.  Which ones will you try out?

#1 – Wallwisher
A Web 2.0 free online tool where anyone can build a “wall”.  Discussing a new idea? Taking notes? Giving feedback? Voicing opinion? Wishing a happy birthday?  Your students can then go onto the internet and stick post-it notes electronically onto your wall.  The notes can include linked pictures, You Tube videos, PowerPoints, PDF documents, Excel Spreadsheets, or web page links.

#2 – Self-grading Quizzes
Learn how to create a self grading, multiple choice quiz using Google Docs

#3 – Bitstrips for Schools
A web-based resource that enables any student to write their own great-looking, original comic strips without having to draw.

#4 – Classtools.net
Free flash tool website that allows you to create quizzes, diagrams, and educational games. You can then host them on your own site free of charge.

#5 – Edmodo
Web 2.0 tool that allows teachers to safely share ideas, files, assignments, videos, projects, etc.with students and with other teachers in real time. It is a safe and secure social learning site for classrooms.

#6 – DoInk
A simple & friendly vector editor that can create flash-style animations.  You can download your art, post to YouTube or Facebook and use the community art or just your art.

#7 – Kerpoof
Kerpoof is all about having fun, discovering things, and being creative. Here are just a few ways that you can use Kerpoof: Make artwork (even if you aren’t good at drawing!); Make an animated movie (really! it’s easy!); Earn Koins which you can trade for fun things in the Kerpoof Store; Make a printed card, t-shirt, or mug; Tell a story; Make a drawing; Vote on the movies, stories, and drawings that other people have made.

#8 – Glogster
GlogsterEDU (the Basic, Free version) is a Web 2.0 tool that allows students, or yourself, to create an online interactive poster/presentation/research on any topic that combines graphics, backgrounds, videos, images, sound, text and hyperlinks.  (This is one of my most favourite free web2.0 tools for the classroom)

#9 – ToonDoo
Free, fast, and facile comic strip creator.

#10 – Wordle
A word cloud, helps to interpret the meaning of the words by assigning font size according to how frequently the word appears in the targeted text. (Another favourite of mine)

#11 – Skype
Free voice and video calls using Skype is great for talking with authors, experts, peer classrooms, language classes, and more.  (Highly recommend this one!)

#12 – Animoto
Web 2.0 tool that allows teachers and students to create impressive and unique digital stories and presentations (incorporating images, video clips, music and text) quickly and easily. Animoto is a wonderful tool for students because it allows them to focus on content creation rather than trying to learn an editing or manipulation tool. In the school context, Animoto For Education is ideal tool for students to create their own booktrailers, digital stories or music videos.

#13 – VoiceThreads
An application that can be used right from your browser, which allows you to use different types of media to create an interactive slideshow.  You can use pictures, videos, documents, or even presentations.  Then, you or your students can record video/audio that allows you to describe each slide in more detail.  You can even draw right on the slide to circle or highlight different areas of interest.  (Love this tool!)

#14 – PhotoFiltre
We, and our students, all need to edit and manipulate images at some point. There are many image editors we can use to do this. However most of these are quite complex to learn and are also often only available at a relatively high cost. PhotoFiltre is both simple to use and free to download.

#15 – Livebinders
A digital 3 ring binder that you can put virtually anything into; webpage, PDF, document, image, or video. Everything is organized by tab and you can even have subtabs within those tabs.

#16 – WeeBehave
WeeBehave provides online chore and behavior charts to help teachers and parents track and record behavior patterns. The WeeBehave philosophy is that children can be better self-managed when using behavior and chore charts. Research shows that children will accomplish more if they can visibly see their results and participate in the goal setting process. This website helps accomplish that!

#17 – DropBox
A free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again! (Personally, I adore this application & wouldn’t leave home without it!)

#18 – Jing
Jing is a screen sharing tool. It allows you to capture anything on your computer screen either as a still image or as a video up to 5 minutes long. It is a good free  tool for narrating and sharing what is on your screen.  (ISB staff – you already have jing installed on your laptops – just type jing in the spotlight to find it)

#19 – Audacity
Free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. (Similar to GarageBand)

#20 – LearnBoost
LearnBoost empowers with a free all-in-one online classroom management solution so they can track student grades and progress, create standards-aligned lesson plans, generate beautiful analytics and reports, and organize their schedules from a central dashboard, all while integrating with Google Apps. Teachers can share academic progress and attendance with parents and students using the safe and secure student and parent platform.

#21 – Wetoku
A simple platform for interviewing someone via the Internet. Collaborating globally is a must for our students and as result interviewing can be a challenge. Wetoku makes doing an interview as easy as filling out some basic information, creating an interview session and then sending the creative interview session’s URL to the interviewee.

#22 – Little Bird Tales
Little Bird Tales is an incredibly easy to create a high-quality digital story. The site allows users to create narrated slideshows, using their own photos or illustrations and their own voices.

#23 – Wikispaces
Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick” and a wiki is a website that can be modified quickly and easily.

And here’s one of my own personal favourites that is well worth “dabbling” with over the summer …
# – Prezi
An easy to use, online editor that makes zooming presentations.  CheatSheets & Video Tutorials to help you learn Prezi are provided!

Book Spine Poetry

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LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this idea of creating poetry from the spines of books.  It’s from the two gorgeous ladies over at Pro Divas (who got it from a tweet from Travis Jonker aka:@100scopenotes).

It appeals to the photographer in me and my own love of poetry.  What a great way to inspire kids who struggle to come up with ideas to get them started!

Here’s my first attempt (from my library of books at home)

Book Spine Poetry

iPads in the Kinder Quad

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Thanks to the generousity of our PTA, funds have been approved to purchase 6 iPad2s for the Kindergarten/Pre-K quad.

An intial meeting with a Kinder team rep (aka: the techie Akiko), the following things have been decided:

  • A separate iTunes account will be created for each team:  Pre-K Team & Kinder
  • The EdTech Accounts department will purchase credit for the iTunes account so that Paid apps can be purchased (spending can also be tracked through this department)
  • Purchase audio splitters (so that 2 or more students can listen to audio on the iPad2 at the same time)
  • The iPads will travel in pairs (so that 3 classrooms can have access to the iPads at any given time)
  • Before the end of the year we will try to purchase 3 iPad2s (they are currently sold out in Thailand) so that all of the team members can “play” with the iPad over the summer.  (Teachers are meeting each other during the summer at various Professional Development courses & will swap iPads over)
  • The focus areas will be Literacy & Math
  • Technology & Learning Coach (me) will:
    • pass on a collected list of iPad apps & recommendations (from PLN) to the team to trial
    • set up an Action Research in Literacy & Math to measure the impact of the iPad2 on student learning (with the plan to get approval for the purchase of more iPads – 6 per classroom)
    • Visit schools in Hong Kong (& Japan – hopefully) to observe how iPads/iTouches are being used in the classroom (with the plan to get approval for the purchase of iTouches for Grade 1)

Apps To Get Started: PreK-K Team

iReading – Stories Collection I lite for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

iReading – Stories Collection I lite (Free)
AppleTreeBooks™ has been inviting some of the best illustrators from across the world to create illustrated stories for us. Exquisite pictures, vivid narration as well as animation and interactive features bring you and your children wonderful stories and a brand new reading experience. We have carefully selected various stories, including well-known classic fairy tales and new original stories, to give you many options to find the ones you love. Additionally, we will continuously update the books on our online bookshelf, so that you can read our illustrated stories at any time. AppleTreeBooks™ will enables you to experience a new kind of reading and the fun that comes along with it.

Talking Tom Cat for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
Talking Tom (Free)
Tom is your pet cat, that responds to your touch and repeats everything you say with a funny voice. Excellent for those kids who are reluctant talkers, or for beginner EAL students learning to say words or phrases.
Pop Math Lite for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
PopMath Lite is the free version of the award winning PopMath.
It is a fun way for kids to practice basic math: 6 pairs of bubbles with numbers float on the screen above beautiful backgrounds.  Each bubble contains a number, like 7 and 3+4: pop the right pairs!  As you progress through levels, numbers increase. End of levels greet you with your time for that level, a message personalized to your performance, and the number of mistakes you did. This free version is limited to additions. The full version PopMath features additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, including the choice to practice a given operator for even better drills. It also contains many more background images for more fun.
Learn ABC recognition, writing, and listening skills with animals.   Two writing modes:
1) ALPHABET LETTERS: Write the Capital and Lower-Case letters and learning the letter recognition along with the sound.
2) WORDS: Hear the animal name, write the animal name, and learning the spelling in the process. 

ABC First Phonics - Sight Words Free Lite for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
Brain Counts apps – there are quite a number of lite (free) versions of the Brain Counts apps available for the iPad
iTunes
ABC Sight Words HD Lite (Free)
Learning over 200+ Dolch Sight Words or “High Frequency” Words will help your child learn to read better, and in most schools, it is a requirement for the kids to know these without sounding them out.  The POWER in this learning tool is the ability to change the setting to fit your child’s learning level and style and design to grow with your child. Use this to design your own custom learning lesson plans.
Learn Number counting, writing, and listening skills. This game reinforces associative learning which may aid in early brain development in young kids and may help your child get a HEAD START in READING and WRITING.
ABCMouse.com Grand Canyon for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
ABC Mouse (Free)
This book is part of the next generation of interactive mobile books for kids. With unique features, engaging art, and high quality narration and music, this book will be a favorite for kids of all ages.  Features of this book include:
Realistic page turning – Swipe your finger or click on a corner
Read to Me – The Book reads aloud with professional narration and music
Read with Pause – The reader turns the pages and can read along with the narrator
I Can Read It – The reader reads the book all by themselves
Glossary – Readers can select the glossary on pages to learn the meaning of difficult words through simple explanations
Clickable Search & Explore – On certain pages, kids can click on the animals that they find to hear the names of the animals read aloud.
Fun Facts – Filled with fun facts about the Grand Canyon that will educate and amaze your child. There may even be things that the parents don’t know!
Fully Produced Song – Listen to the entire Grand Canyon song as song by the award-winning ABCMouse.com team at the end of the book.
StoryKit for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
StoryKit (free)
Create an electronic storybook. Make use of the little gaps in life – on the sofa after dinner, in the back seat of the car, or on a train – to do something creative together.
Storyrobe for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
StoryRobe (0.99)
Amobile digital storytelling application. Create a digital story in three simple steps.
1. Choose Images/Videos
2. Record Story
3. Upload to YouTube or Email to friends
Alphabet Tracing for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
Fun train, truck and worm animations come to life for children to follow, while showing the proper way to write alphabet letters and numbers.
TeachMe: Kindergarten for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
TeachMe: Kindergarten (0.99)
TeachMe: Kindergarten is an educational iPhone app which teaches four different age appropriate subjects to Kindergarten aged children: sight words, addition, subtraction and spelling. Subjects can be selected, set different difficulty levels, and you can even choose specific questions. The performance history for each subject can be reviewed.
Word Magic for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Word Magic (0.99)
Word Magic is designed keeping preschooler and kindergarten kids in mind. It is very ideal for kids between the ages 3 to 6. It is an excellent application for kids to have fun with words and their spelling and learn them.  A picture is shown and the kids should select the missing letter for the picture. The picture for the word will be read out. There are three flavors. Based on the kids level, you can choose missing letter at the beginning or in the middle or in the last. 

Licking Letters for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store
Licking Letters (o.99)
Jump into the pond and help your lovable friend, Hoppy the Frog, lick letters to spell words! Kids will have a blast with this exciting and fun spelling adventure! (Ages 2-8)

Links to Others’ Recommended Apps Lists

TeachWithYouriPad I love the way this wiki has been set out!  Clicking on the link above will transport you to an entire page of suitable K-2 apps.  There’s a blurb about the app & the cost – they are also listed in curriculum areas.

teachwithyouripad - Grade K-2 Apps

iPads as Research Tools for Kindergarten
From Zoe Page – Kindergarten Teacher at YIS using iPads in the classroom

iPad Apps for Primary
From Fraser Spiers’ blog

10 Top iPad Apps for Kindergarten
From 1:1 in Practise blog

iPad Apps for the classroom
From One Thought Ahead blog

50 Educational Apps for the iTouch
From Keri-Lee Beasley’s blog: Tip of The Iceberg – most of the apps listed are suitable for the iPad too.

iPad Sharing #1
From Allanah King’s blog: Life is not a Race to be Finished – A list of her favourite apps for the iPad so far.

10 Top iPhone Apps for Kids
Wait! There’s More: Another 10 iPhone Apps for Kids
From Travel Savvy Mom (even though these are iPhone apps, they can be played on iPads too).
Note:  Most of the apps recommended on these blog posts are paid apps.

Can you help?

Given that our focus is Literacy & Math apps – what K-2 apps do you recommend?
How do you know iPads in the classroom impact student learning?
How do you collect the data?

365 Grateful Project

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This little video came up in my RSS feed today – and immediately struck a chord with me!

[vimeo width="600" height="400"]http://vimeo.com/22100389[/vimeo]

One tweet to my PLN about it & one response is all it takes to get a project rolling ……..

TweetDeck
Uploaded with Skitch!

Here’s a few ideas swirling around in my head after a quick skype conversation with the very talented Rob (in Singapore!):
  • Global project for 2011/12 – classrooms around the world
  • Different projects to suit different needs / time available
  • Rather than a photo a day from everyone – a photo a week?
  • Photos made into a book – available for purchase?
  • Donate proceeds of book to a charity that we’re grateful exists?
  • iMovie project – “A class full of gratefulness”
  • How can we incorporate writing? (since that’s a BIG focus for our ES next school year)
  • Create a website
  • Google doc spreadsheet for people to sign up their classes

I haven’t been this excited about a project in a while …..

So how about you?  Would you like to join in?  Do you have some ideas to add?  I’d love to hear from you!!

A Message to Japan

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It was all hands on deck in the Elementary School this afternoon as we tried to make 1000 paper cranes as a symbol of peace, health and happiness for the people of Japan.  Over the past week and a half, the ES, MS & HS have been running various fundraisers to raise money for those living in the devastated by earthquake and tsunami parts of Northern Japan. Here’s one Grade 3′s class effort, folding as many paper cranes as we could in an hour.

Share and Share-Alike

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The power of your personal network really shines through when you share. Share

Today I shared 10 minutes of my time by skyping into @jasongraham99′s staff meeting in Jakarta, and sharing “3 apps and a tip” for the iPad. I have to say it was pretty hard to narrow the choice down to only 3 apps (so during the “tip” I managed to sneak in another app!).

By using the document camera, the iPad and the share screen function of the Skype (for Mac), I was able to demo the apps and the tips really clearly.

So what did I share?
App 1: Idea Sketch FREE
- fantastic for brainstorming, can email ideas, save to photos.  It lets you easily draw a diagram – mind map, concept map, or flow chart – and convert it to a text outline, and vice versa.

App 2: Chicktionary FREE
-excellent vocabulary/spelling “game” – remember when the teacher put up a word on the board & you had to see how many words you could make from the letters – well this is it iPad style and it’s one of my FAVOURITES!

App 3: Talking Tom FREE
-demo-ed how you can video “Talking Tom” - great for students who are learning English or any other language for that matter, great for reluctant speakers (remember using “puppets”?) who don’t like to talk to “others” but for some reason they love to talk to Tom! The video could easily be a record of oral progress! (Once you get over the initial giggles of course!)

Tip: Install iBooks and get the iPad User Guide as a free download because it’s got a tonne of tips in there!  (see how I sneakily got that extra app in there!!)
Here’s an extra link – just for you dear reader(s) – download this awesome FREE PDF from makeuseof.com with a wealth of tips & tricks for the iPad.

I did show how you can tap a word in iBooks and you can instantly look up the meaning of that word, and I did show how to do a screenshot of anything on the iPad by holding down the home button and the power button at the same time (& the images automatically ends up in photos) so I guess that I snuck in 2 extra tips as well!!  My mother always told me I was not a very good counter!

What would you share if @jasongraham99 asked you to skype into his next staff meeting?

Easy Peasy Attribution AND Creative Commons!

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So I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days about blogging – or my LACK of it – and wondering why there’s a LACK of it, ways that I can change this slack LACK-of-blogging habit, I have so easily fallen into, and involving myself in lots and lots of looking at how my favourite bloggers appear to be so prolific!

And I know what it is …….. when I’m excited about something ……. I want to share it!  So here’s something that I’m very excited about!  I’ve been working with Grades 2 and 3 recently, using Compfight to find creative commons images for their poetry – and teaching them about attribution at the same time.  Yes, these gorgeous little 8/9 year olds know the word attribution and they know it means giving credit to someone whose work you’ve used.  Bless their hearts, they’ve followed cheat sheets, ask questions and really tried hard to search on compfight, download images to the desktop, rename files, copy URLs, copy Usernames or Real Names and paste them on the last slide of their powerpoints!

In Grade 5, there’s image searching going on for presentations for the Sustainability unit and of course there’s a tonne of blogging going in this grade, as well as Grade 4 & two classes in Grade 3, so I’m always reminding everyone about Creative Commons & Attribution – making tutorials, creating cheat sheets and writing blog posts on embedding and attributing correctly.  All while, mainly using compfight – I do love this site very much – I really do. (And it’s still a great site if you need to download the image files for use in offline presentation such as powerpoint/keynote etc)

But now, tonight, through twitter (thanks to the fabulous Ms Tara aka @bookchica retweeting @colingally) I’ve gone to Technology Coach heaven – and compfight has been toppled!  (well for embedding creative commons images & attribution in a blog post!)

Introducing Wylio.com

For bloggers, it’s SO simple, so easy and only 4 steps from finding a creative commons image to embedding it in a post for your blog!!

Step 1

Free Pictures - Wylio.com

Step 2

Step 2

Step 3

step3

Step 4

step 4
All images uploaded with Skitch!

Unbelievably easy and PERFECT for little bloggers!  Wylio – you rock!!

***Update****

Wylio.com - free pictures

Of course, in this ever changing world of technology – Wylio has changed slightly since I first posted about it!
Due to it’s growing popularity ….. Wylio now requires you to create a free account & login to use. You can use your google account if you have one!

My advice, for classroom teachers would be to create a class google account for Wylio – one email address, one password – for the whole class to remember.
(A class google account can come in handy for all kinds of other things in the classroom – another blog post for later).