Collaborative Tools Project

I went to an interesting workshop run by Simon Davis this week looking at using Google Apps in Education. I was there to demo Google Hangouts and unfortunately had a heap of technical problems ( my laptop battery died... oops! Note: never believe it when your battery says it has 2 hours of juice ). Luckily, I had a Hangout I'd prepared earlier. The best bit for me was Catherine Shawyer (right) showing how, in Education, they were using a variety of Google Apps with elegance and gusto. They used template Google Sites for portfolio work (shown below). They found the sheer reliability of Google Apps was hugely important given their students loss of trust having used other tools and simply lost work by accidentally clicking the back button or similar. Usability really matters. But their most enthusiastic use was in using Google Sites for the hugely valuable process of self assessment. Typically, this previously took place on paper that became increasingly dog-eared and was o...

The Idea Prof  +Tom Stoneham  and Nick Jones had the idea of using Google Sites as an alternative to textual documents for student work, in this case, a dissertation about a certain philosopher. Google Sites give the opportunity for the creation of a network of information rather than a narrative document. A site can hold videos, audio and refer to other online resources with links. The idea was that there would be a simple template site (see above), with boiler plate text and guidance about copyright issues etc. and the student could then start editing existing pages and creating new ones. Administration From an administrational perspective, the Google sites would need to be closed to student when the deadline was met. Ideally, it would good if the student could have a copy of their Google Site - both to continue working on it and to use in their portfolio of work. Whilst Tom didn't need the student's identity to be anonymized, but we used a unique reference n...

After discovering that my direction of work for the Booking System was from a security perspective , deeply flawed, I thought that I could perhaps work around giving people access to the code by embedding a web application within a Google site. I thought this would be a big structural change, but it only took a few minutes. It looks like this. There's a slightly different approach. Firstly the spreadsheet is embedded as view only. The spreadsheet is only used a visualisation of availability now - there's no direct manipulation of any data.  Because, almost without thinking, I made the published web app a HTML based one, it meant that I could easily add jQuery and interface niceties like the date choosing dropdown (shown above). Because all the code runs as me, and I've already authorized the code, the end user isn't presented with any awful dialogs. I make adding the booking something that the end user does, by hand themselves. You can pre-populate a Goog...

Tom Stoneham came to us with an interesting problem... "Can I automatically create 80 or so HomeWork Google Sites from a template for students? And when the deadline has been reached can their access be revoked and links sent out to examiners". The students' task will be create a site about a particular philosopher. The prototype looks like this... I'd had a stab at solving this earlier to see it was possible, and maybe too quickly I jumped for python. But in the spirit of making something that a. worked, b. was sharable, c. I wouldn't have to maintain ( hopefully ), I thought I'd have a go a re-doing it in AppScript. Having met with Tom, there were a few addition requirements: Can student sites have unique IDs that are mapped on to a marking sheet? Can the URLs be kept in a list because, if you have 80 students then 8 markers may be given 10 students each? What is the best way for the University of keep the snapshot but still give the student t...