Sample Video Post

By David Henson | Published: December 12, 2008

I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about how to add video to a blog. 

The good news is that you can actually leverage the power of Google to assist you in hosting your videos.  Video’s can be uploaded to http://video.google.com where they can then be referenced and embedded into a post.

After uploading your video to the Google Video site, simply click ‘show’ next to the embed video section. You can then copy the embed code and paste it into the ‘code’ section of your blog post. (looks something like this):

<embed id=”VideoPlayback” src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1458530843428833279&hl=en&fs=true” style=”width:400px;height:326px” allowFullScreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”> </embed>

 Make sure you take care to ‘unlist’ the video’s that you upload.  This will prevent them from being returned in Google video search results.

Posted in Informational | 2 Comments

Student Addresses in Outlook

By David Henson | Published: December 11, 2008

In an effort to make emailing your student Gmail accounts as seamless as possible, we will be adding contacts for both student email accounts and course groups into the Outlook Global Address List.  This means that you will be able to email a student simply by typing their name in the ‘To…’ field of an email. Each student name will include (Student) after their name to alleviate any concerns of mistakenly sending emails to students in the case of similar name matches.

Emailing a course will email all of the students  and the teacher for that course.  This should make emailing your students a breeze.

Courses will be listed in the Address List using the following format:  ‘Course<School_ID> <Course_Num>_<Section_Num>’ for example, ‘Course 47EL005_1’.

The courses / student contacts will be initially imported into Outlook over Christmas break.  Course enrollment changes will be updated nightly.

Posted in Informational | Leave a comment

New Teacher Distribution Lists

By David Henson | Published: November 24, 2008

We’ve now added new ‘Teacher’ distribution lists to our Exchange server. 

If you find yourself needing to send a message to all of the teachers at your school and didn’t want to include the office/support staff, simply address the message to ‘<school name> Teacher’. 

For Example:
‘Skyview Teachers’ or ‘Soldotna El. Teachers’ (without the ‘ of course)

Posted in Informational | Leave a comment

Student Passwords

By David Henson | Published: November 16, 2008

4th + Students can no longer keep the default user password that is assigned at account creation.

If you are a teacher and have a student that cannot login to their computer, simply type ‘passwords’ in the address bar of Internet explorer and you can reset it for them.

As always, Office secretaries can reset passwords as well.

Posted in Informational | Leave a comment

GApps update: Student email notifier

By David Henson | Published: November 4, 2008

trimmed

Eric has worked his magic yet again.  It looks like we will now have a student email notifier that is automatically configured at student login.  The original Open Source project that we found to do email notification wouldn’t work with the single sign-on login that we’re using.  Eric dug into the Source and tweaked it to work with a custom Profile generation web app that he wrote to generate student notifier profiles.  This way, when the app is launched at student login, it gets it’s profile from the web server (encrypted) and logs the student into the correct Gmail account.

For those unfamiliar with notifiers, basically they are little applications that live in the system tray (next to the windows clock) that let you know when you receive new mail. 

Jesse is hard at work ‘skinning’ the notification interface.  Our goal is to make the notifier visually consistant with the Gmail interface.

We will most likely provide the notifier as an application that can be assigned to staff computers as well.  This will allow the ‘Software manager’ at each school to determine which computers it should be assigned to (if any).

For those students/staff that would like to use a notifier at home, we will be providing a download link on the sign-in page. 

Posted in Informational, Software Changes | 1 Comment