Columbus State University goes mobile with Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Robert Diveley, Executive Director of Operations at Columbus State University's Office of Information and Technology Services, as our guest blogger today. Robert's post describes how his school has provided real-time access to student information using Google Mobile Apps.

Columbus State University, located in Columbus, Georgia, started using Google Apps Education Edition in early 2009 and has since successfully implemented Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Video on campus. One challenge for our university, as with many others in today’s economy, is that student enrollment continues to rise while budgets remain flat. Accordingly, it's been pretty tough for us to keep pace with the IT demand.

We recently surveyed our students and learned that, no surprisingly, they strongly preferred to communicate with our school via cell phone andPDA . So we thought that we could get ahead of the curve by offering information live on these devices, allowing our students access to the latest information available and being able to avoid lines and other communications slow-downs, especially at the beginning of new terms.

To solve our problem we looked to Google for guidance on how to interface Google Mobile Apps with our Student Information System. We began our development process using the tools provided through Google’s online developer kit and even enlisted some Columbus State University students to take part in the project by taking advantage of the Android for Beginners group.

Thanks to this integration, the information we are now able to provide in real-time from our Student Information System onto cell phones and PDAs includes:

• Student Account Information – amount owed, refund available, holds on account
• Student Scholastic Information – GPA, adviser contact and grades
• Student’s Individual Schedule of Classes
• Required Documents – Financial Aid, Immunization
• University Activity Schedule
• University Sports Schedule
• Shuttle Bus Schedule
• Campus Map
  
  
  

We've included two screen shots displaying what students can see on their mobile devices below:

We foresee that the use of Mobile Apps will add to our customer service capabilities and allow students to more easily find information that might otherwise require phone calls or lines. Our ultimate goal is to duplicate all of the services that we now provide to students through our university portal. By doing so students will literally have all of our services on hand at all times.

As you can see, delivering this information on a mobile device makes everything easier for our students and proactively addresses frequently asked questions, helping students successfully take charge ofthier own issues and needs.

Robert Diveley, Executive Director of Operations
Office of Information & Technology Services, Columbus State University

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education team

Where in the world is ...

It's been a month since out last imagery update and I know you're all hungry for more data, so today we've finished pushing out some great imagery to Google Earth. Below are a few hints that should help you find some of the new imagery. Happy hunting!

1) Once a political capitol, now a financial capitol, MapMakers in this city rapidly growing have cried for updated imagery and we have delivered.

2) With updated imagery over this city, you can see leftovers from the Texas Tech - Virginia game.

3) This former "closed city" just got a GeoEye-1 update.

4) The wettest area of the continental United States has gotten an update. (Hint: it's a Rain Forest)

5) This beloved stadium, which was built for the 1978 World Cup, is still in pretty good shape from the looks of it. There's even a go-kart track in the parking lot!

6) Ever wonder where Aluminum comes from? Africa's second largest Aluminum production site has gotten new imagery.

7) This great palace was constructed between 1857 and 1859, but was mostly destroyed by allied bombing in World War II. Finally re-built in the 90's, this site is now a major tourist destination.

8) Though you can't do any shopping here from your desk, you can now view South America's largest open-air market with increased clarity.

9) Connected to civilization by an ice road and a gravel runway, this diamond mine is difficult to opperate.

Posted by Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior GIS Strategist

Google voice and video update for Snow Leopard

Over the weekend, we released a specific 1.0.15 update for the Google voice and video chat software. This update is for Mac computers only, and is focused on resolving compatibility issues with Mac OS X v10.6, Snow Leopard. All current Mac installations on OS X v10.4 and v10.5 will begin an automatic update within the next few days.

However, if you have previously installed an older version of Google voice and video chat on OS X v10.6, you will need to re-install it manually by visiting http://www.google.com/chat/video and download the new 1.0.15 version.

You can use your Gmail account to find out what version is currently installed. Simply go to the Gmail Settings page and look under the "Chat" tab. You will see the plugin version under the "Learn more" link, in small type.

The following Mac OS X v10.6 issues were fixed in version 1.0.15:

* Fixed problem where the Google Talk Plugin was not detected in Safari
* Fixed problem where the Google Talk Plugin would delay system sleep by 30 seconds
* Fixed problem where video would not be displayed in a video chat
* Fixed problem where registration for automatic upgrades did not work
* Fixed problem when uninstalling and reinstalling the same version

If, after installing version 1.0.15, you continue to encounter issues with video not being displayed, a single reboot of your Mac should fix the problem. We are working with Apple to resolve this. If you are on 1.0.15 and experience problems, please report them on the Gmail voice and video chat forums.


Posted by Justin Uberti
Software Engineer

Google Voice for Newbies: Custom Greetings

This week, I'd like to talk about a Google Voice feature some of you may not have heard about: custom greetings. With custom greetings, you're able to record personalized voicemail greetings that only play to a specific group of people or to an individual. This feature is completely optional, but once you use it, you may realize how helpful and fun it can be.

Instructions for creating a basic custom greeting can be found in the Google Voice Help Center, along with tips for recording custom greetings for "different groups or individuals in your contact list.".










I'll give you examples of how I'm using custom greetings, but these are just a few ideas -- perhaps you'll be able to think of other creative ways to take advantage of custom greetings.

General default: "Hi, I can't get to the phone right now, so please leave your name and a message. If you don't leave a message, I probably won't return your call. Thanks."

Friends: "I might be in, I might be out. Leave a message and you might find out!

Grandparents-who-only-speak-Chinese: "爺爺奶奶你們好。對不起我現在不能接電話。請給我留言，我等會兒給你們打回來。謝謝！"

I can also imagine custom greetings being incredibly useful if you own a business. You can have a "professional" greeting associated to your business contacts and perhaps some important business partners would even have a custom greeting that includes emergency contact information.

Now that you have a bit more insight on custom greetings, be creative and record yours today. If you encounter any issues, search first to see if another user reported it in the Google Voice Help Forum; if you don't see the issue, ask users for help in the Problem Solving section of the forum.

If there are other features you'd like to see in Google Voice, please leave your suggestion on the Google Voice Suggestions page.

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.

In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

• "E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
• "E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
• "E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process:

• Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
• Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:
• Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
• Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
• Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.
• To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.

To learn more about creating electronic portfolios using Google Docs and Google Sites, see a Google Site I set up to support e-portfolio development in both K-12 schools and Higher Education. As part of my research for my book, I am looking for K-12 teachers who want to create e-portfolios using GoogleApps for Education. Interested? Email me.

Posted by: Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

Electronic Portfolios with Google Apps

Guest post: Dr. Helen Barrett is a retired teacher educator, an independent researcher, and international trainer/consultant on electronic portfolios and digital storytelling in education. This year, she is writing a book about using Web 2.0 tools to create Interactive Portfolios.

In schools and colleges across the world, students are developing "E-Portfolios" which include digital collections and reflections on their work, created for a wide variety of purposes. According to this website, "An e-portfolio is a learner-driven collection of digital objects demonstrating experiences, achievements and evidence of learning. E-portfolios provide learners with a structured way of recording their learning experiences... and can include a range of digital evidence such as audio, video, photographs and blogs."

An e-portfolio is created from many small, inter-connected pieces. Google's suite of web-based products offers a rich environment for creating e-portfolios, which incorporates several different elements and tools, depending on your purpose:

• "E-Portfolios for Learning" provide an environment to reflect about your learning, telling your own story of growth over time. These working portfolios are often structured as journals or blogs where you can include samples of your work along with personal reflections. (This is my Blogger blog, where I document my activities, achievements, and reflections... my personal learning environment.)
• "E-Portfolios for Personal Branding and Self-Marketing" let you develop a "resume on steroids" for showcasing skills and samples of your best work to potential employers, customers, or graduate schools. (This is my Google Site, set up with my own domain name in Google Apps, highlighting my professional achievements.)
• "E-Portfolios for Assessment/Accountability" are used by educational institutions to document achievement, sometimes replacing or supplementing standardized tests, or more traditional forms of evaluation. (I don't have an example, because many of these highly structured portfolios are behind passwords and most universities use customized systems for this purpose.)

If you are interested in creating an e-portfolio for one of these purposes, here is a recommended process:

• Begin with a working portfolio, that could be as simple as a reflective journal or blog in Blogger, the Announcements page type in Google Sites, or even a Google Docs document set up as a diary.
• Using several Google tools, collect digital documents that represent your best or typical work:
• Google Docs provides a great environment for developing and storing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations as well as PDFs. Google Docs also lets you share your work with others for commenting and feedback.
• Share videos and images using YouTube and Picasa.
• Upload other file types as attachments in Google Sites.
• To create a more structured presentation of your work for a particular audience, select certain pieces to go into a more tailored portfolio/website. Google Sites can help you organize your work with a reflective narrative, telling your story while linking to supporting evidence (selected entries from your journal/blog and links to files in your digital archive) to meet your intended purpose. Here is a high school portfolio where a student documents his senior project.

To learn more about creating electronic portfolios using Google Docs and Google Sites, see a Google Site I set up to support e-portfolio development in both K-12 schools and Higher Education. As part of my research for my book, I am looking for K-12 teachers who want to create e-portfolios using GoogleApps for Education. Interested? Email me.

Posted by: Helen C. Barrett, Ph.D.

SketchUp 7.1 is here

[Cross-posted with the SketchUp Blog]

Fall is just around the corner here in Boulder, and with it comes our next release of Google SketchUp (cue the bugling elk). The team's been working long hours through the summer on projects large and small. I'm proud to announce that Google SketchUp 7.1 is available today for you to download and install. Don't you just love the smell of fresh new software?

Even though we're calling this a "point" release (you lucky Pro 7.0 users will get this update for free!), Google SketchUp 7.1 includes a lot more than just minor tweaks and bug fixes. We've added a batch of new features and functionality that make SketchUp (and LayOut 2.1 in SketchUp Pro) even more useful for everyone. Here's some of what's new:

Large Model Handling

We overhauled SketchUp's rendering engine to make it easier to work with big models. With the right setup, operations like orbiting, zooming and drawing are quicker and smoother. Of course, how much quicker depends entirely on factors like your computer's configuration and the specific model you're working on. For most people, most of the time, SketchUp should feel snappier when they're working with lots of geometry. Have a look at this article to find out how to take advantage of the improvements we made.

Better File Exchange

One of the things we're pretty concerned about around here is something called data liberation. Too often, your stuff's locked inside proprietary file formats that force you to use whatever tool you used to create it. We don't think that's right, so we're doing what we can to make it easier to move your data around.

COLLADA is a 3D file format based on open standards; it makes it easier to move your models between different pieces of software. KMZ is the standard file format for packaging 3D models together with information about their geographic locations. SketchUp 7.1 can import and export COLLADA and KMZ files, which should go a long way toward letting you do whatever you like with your data.

Modeling in Context

Whether you're building photo-textured, geo-located models that are headed for Google Earth, or just trying to cobble together some context for a design proposal, you should be interested about the stuff I talk about in this short video:



Get Photo Texture gives you direct access to Google Maps Street View imagery from right inside SketchUp. You can use panoramic, street-level photography we've gathered to photo-texture your models. It's spooky-cool.

Nearby Models lets you use the Component Browser to search the 3D Warehouse for buildings located near the one you're working on. Bringing in a geo-location snapshot first tells SketchUp where to look.

Upload Component provides a shortcut for uploading parts of your model to the 3D Warehouse without having to save them out as separate files first. This is handy if you're modeling several buildings on the same block; it's also useful for preserving the functionality of Dynamic Components when you upload them.

Dimensioned Drawings in Google SketchUp Pro

We've given SketchUp Pro a big upgrade in this release; it's specially targeted at those of you who need to make professional design documents to communicate your work to clients and partners. LayOut 2.1 (included in SketchUp Pro 7.1) now includes a simple but surprisingly powerful tool for dimensioning models and creating dimensioned drawings. There's a bunch more to talk about in LayOut 2.1, but we'll save that for another blog post tomorrow.

...and if that's not enough, have you got an idea for what we should do next?

In earlier days, we used to be able to talk to everybody who was using SketchUp. Every week, well over a million of you are using SketchUp, and it's getting really hard to remember all of your names – much less the new features you'd like us to build. For this release, I've put up a shiny new Google SketchUp Product Ideas page that you can use to let us know what you think we should build next. Don't hold back – I'm listening, and I'll respond formally to (at least) the top ten ideas you post.

And if you just want to talk about SketchUp, please head on over to the Help Center where you'll see that we've done a big upgrade on our discussion forums.

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Manager