New Connections

Here's our current connection:

The future blogger of tomorrow, today!

Our 7th graders have been blogging, and blogging quite nicely I don't mind saying writing.

Email today, but forever?

[When I said I'd blog once a week, I meant it.  And I do mean to have at least one post a week, but school life is just too hectic.  I will try to actually schedule more frequent postings here.]


This is the first year with students having school-issued email. It has of course made communicating with students easier.  We have had a few hiccups, like not all students understood (understand?) that they are required to use their school email for schoolwork. Or students deleting emails (to keep a clean inbox) that they then needed again and again.  These type of minor problems are easily resolved over time.


But one problem I do recognize is that email does not hold the same importance to younger generations, as it does to those who have been in the workplace for several years. This was illustrated wonderfully by during a conversation between Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia co-founder) and Charlie Rose:

JIMMY WALES:  [snip] One problem with e-mail is spam and you get junk mail and the nice thing about Facebook is that everybody’s identified and there’s a way to identify if people are spammers or not.  And it’s interesting when you talk to young people these days they hardly use e-mail.  It’s a dinosaur thing to some extent.  So it’s remarkable.  

CHARLIE ROSE:  What happened?  How did they come to that?  

JIMMY WALES:  I think they’re using Facebook to communicate with friends and using instant messenger to chat, and e-mail didn’t seem useful.  I live on my e-mail.  I’m a dinosaur.

 (Jimmy Wales interview Charlie Rose)

I'm a dinosaur too, but learning how to properly use and, more importantly, juggle a work/school email is a skill they will need for the foreseeable future. Email is the main communication tool in work life today and the next generation needs to master these tools.

A survey by Plantronics found the use of email by professionals has increased 78 percent over the past five years. Nearly 83 percent surveyed use email as a primary communication tool for business, and nearly 57 percent say they are overwhelmed by the volume. Email isn't going away.

More embedded calendars

In an attempt get more information out through our website, and to have a place where students and parents get the information, we've embedded several more calendars at www.ishyd.org. Along the left-hand navigation, click on Calendar, and wait. It takes up to 10 seconds for the calendar to load.

We also put up what days homework is assigned in the middle school. This isn't really a calendar we use as such, just a place for parents to check the schedule.  There is also a Test/Exam calendar, which we are still updating.

Since no blog post is complete without audio or visuals, here some a/v for you. It is semi-related since it mentions "Saturday" (and the band is from my native place).

Logging in, now with full Google Accounts

While we may debate the usefulness of Google making our G-Apps login a full-blown Google Account, we can't debate this: Changes can cause confusion (alliteration? in a tech blog?). The login location I gave to students is/was:

mail.google.com/a/ishstudents.in

and that still works (as long as you don't put "www." at the front of it). When you type that URL into your preferred browser, you'll be redirected to this:

You can see that under the Username entry box, it reads @ishstudents.in and so you'll know at the right place.

It seems that if you have bookmarked mail.google.com/a/ishstudents.in, you may be redirected to a normal looking Google login page (i.e. without the ISH logo branding). It looks like this:

I personally find this annoying, but it really doesn't change anything. If you see this page, you can simply enter your full email as the username (e.g. 2010obama@ishstudents.in) and you will be taken to your inbox.

Digitally yours,

Mr. Patrick

School-issued emails given to Secondary Students

After a brief test, we issued the students in 6th through 12th grade a school email account last week. If you (or your child) were absent at the time, just email me and I pop off the the login information to you. The student login page is at:

http://mail.google.com/a/ishstudents.in

We're glad to finally get this rolled out to the students so we can continue to incorporate technology in the everyday curriculum. Although we leave it up to each individual teacher to decide how to use technology in the classroom, so many were already using email for students to submit completed assignments that the need to normalize the experience became a requirement.

A look back at the history of Microsoft's Internet Explorer

One of the better tech news sites out there in Ars Technica ("the art of technology") and I follow their stories religiously. Their long-form articles are always of the highest quality, and they very discerning on which "breaking news" stories they cover. If it is just some silly web trend, it probably won't show up in their site.


Today they posted a feature article on IE9, which just saw its beta release. Inside the article is a wonderful history of web browsers, which makes well worth the read.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/09/inside-internet-explorer-9-redmond-gets-back-in-the-game.ars
 In beating Netscape, Microsoft may have brought about the death of mainstream, commercial browsers, but in so doing, it also planted the seeds for a new breed of open source browsers. As a last-ditch effort to remain relevant, Netscape open-sourced its browser. This wasn't enough to save Netscape, but that open-source effort evolved into the browser now known as Firefox. Open source was also instrumental in the creation of both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. They both use the WebKit rendering engine, an open-source derivative of the also open-source KHTML engine.


Many people will know me as a promoter of browser other that IE. This is only true to the point that I use, and encourage others to use, tools that work. With the new IE9, it looks like there will be one more tool in my kit.   By the way, I teach in a browser-neutral environment.