TeachMeetNZ Session 2/2015 18 July 2015

Today I had the pleasure to once again be supporting the fabulous +Sonya Van Schaijik and her group of dedicated educators with #TeachMeetNZ as their Twitter Broadcaster. You can view the full recording here on YouTube, and Sonya will be cutting it into individual presentations which will be available from the TeachMeetNZ Wiki in the coming days.

I collated the tweets around this session into a Storify, please enjoy:

Flick app

I'm impressed by how apps and programmes are starting to play nicely across different platforms, Flick is one of these examples. I was introduced to this app by teachers at one of my New Zealand schools in 2014, originally it allowed you to move images from one Apple device to another, e.g. from your MacBook to your iPad and vice versa - rather than plugging the iPad into the MacBook and moving files that way. Last week I found out that Flick can do much more now:

From http://getflick.io/Flick_Windows.pdf 

In a multi-platform BYOD environment this could be a simple and free tool to share images and now documents between the different devices.

What is the use of this in the classroom? If I was in an environment without a reliable cloud platform such as GAFE or O365, this would be a simple way to share an image and / or document between any number of different devices connected to the same wifi.

Note: There is now an auto-destruct feature which reminds me a lot of snapchat (and the controversy around it). As with all digital technologies, we need to ensure we keep (digital) citizenship rights and responsibilities in mind at all times.

Controlling the on-sharing of your Google Docs

It was signalled at the GAFE Summit in Sydney in April, but today is the first time that I have seen how you can control the on-sharing of your Google docs.

Click on Share at the top right of your screen, and this window opens:

Select Advanced, and you get this new window:

Just above the blue 'Done' you can Change who has permission to add people:

Why does this matter? Some information in the education context is private to a certain degree and should not be shared on beyond the initial group. This change will make it much easier for schools to fulfil their obligations without someone accidentally sharing confidential information in the wrong circle.