3 Ways Google Applications can enhance teaching

By richbradshaw | September 6, 2008

Having recently started working at a school where email, calendars, documents etc are hosted by Google Applications, I felt that it would be worth while incorporating these into my teaching and planning. This post describes the benefits I have found from this in the first few weeks, and will outline some plans that I have for the future. If you haven’t used Google Applications in a workplace before, then here’s a quick outline of what’s included in the free version.

  • Gmail (7+ GB of storage)
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Documents
  • Google Sites
  • Google Talk
  • A version of iGoogle called Start Page
The benefit of this straight away is that I can access my email anywhere, either through the web version or using IMAP. The school offers the main calendar in Google Calendar, so I can subscribe to it in any modern software as it uses a standard format. Google Talk lets me see who is avaliable through Gmail’s interface. Google Sites lets non-developers produce dynamic sites which can include blogs, videos etc in an very simple way. The start page lets me check my calendar, email from a central location.
So, having explained what’s included, how can it change the way you teach?

1. Online presentations

I’ve been solely using Google Documents for all my planning and presentations in lessons for 4 reasons: I can edit them and show them anywhere on any computer, share them with pupils and staff with a couple of clicks, embed them in our Moodle site and best of all, embed Youtube videos into the presentations. I tend to use Youtube a lot when teaching as I prefer to show short snappy clips rather than 30-40 minute long videos.

Google Presentations is directly connected to Youtube and allows a simple way to add videos simply by searching within the dialog box.

This stops me constantly flicking between Powerpoint or OpenOffice to Firefox every few minutes and makes for a smoother delivery when teaching.

Again, being able to do this means that I can easily publish lesson in Moodle that are easily viewable.

2. Collaborative Editing

All documents in Google Documents allow editing my multiple users at the same time. This is great for setting pupils group projects (create a presentation, write an essay, do an experiment together) as well as sharing documents such as class lists, long term plans, rotas etc with staff.

One particularly good use for this is allowing a class of pupils to add their results in science to a spreadsheet in real time. I haven’t tried this yet, but will do soon. This will allow analysis of a larger data set, as well as ensuring that all pupils complete the work.

3. Forms

Google Spreadsheets has a nice feature called forms. Basically this lets you send out questionnaires to people. When they respond, the results are available in a spreadsheet. Simple, yet very effective.

This could be added to the ideas above if pupils are not able to fill out a spreadsheet correctly.

Conclusion

As you can see, these tools allow you do so much more than a standard desktop office application - they really have enabled me to do much more on the IT side of things than I have previously.

Do you have any other ideas? Let me know in the comments!

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Benchmarking Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine

By richbradshaw | September 5, 2008

Having previously looked at the memory usage of Google’s Chrome, it’s time to analyse it’s much mentioned javascript engine, V8. Assumedly named after the engine with the same name, V8 compiles javascript to machine code, rather than bytecode to achieve greater performance. In this respect, it’s similar to Firefox 3.1’s TraceMonkey, a JIT javascript compiler again developed to achieve much greater speeds when running javascript.

Anyway, enough of the description, lets look at some results.

We will examine the benchmarks developed by Google to test V8. (Yes, this may provide some bias…)

For each browser these are the average of 3 runs, though each repeat generally yielded a difference of only 1 or two points implying that the benchmarks are already repeated before the results are shown.

First, a summary graph:

Then a breakdown for each individual test:

In these benchmarks, the higher the score, the better the performance.

It’s clear straight away that Chrome is fast. Raw scores show that Chrome runs these tests 10 times faster than Firefox 3.1 (1009 vs. 101), and 40 times faster than IE 8b2 (1009 vs. 23).

Google describes these tests as so:

  • Richards
    OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).
  • DeltaBlue
    One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).
  • Crypto
    Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1689 lines).
  • RayTrace
    Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3418 lines).
  • EarleyBoyer
    Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch’s Scheme2Js compiler (4682 lines).
From these descriptions, it’s clear that they aren’t specifically written for V8, as they are benchmarks that already existed in other languages. For all the browsers, the results appear in the same order implying that they all have the same strengths and weaknesses when the speeds are scaled.
Found different results? Let me know in the comments!
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Google Chrome Memory Usage

By richbradshaw | September 2, 2008
Google Chrome Memory Usage, originally uploaded by Rich Bradshaw.

Browsing to about:memory in Google Chrome gives you this interesting display showing memory usage for both itself as well as other browsers running.

According to the browser, this is the memory usage of the following browsers on blank pages. (Although Chrome is on the about:memory page, that’s a different process, as shown below, so that doesn’t mess things up.)

Browser Total Memory (kb)
Google Chrome 0.2 39,928
Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 62,726
Firefox 3.1b1 76,056
Opera 9.52 20,124
Safari 3.1.1 45,356

 In other words, Opera still uses the least, but Google Chrome is easily in second place, followed by Safari, IE and then Firefox.

Just an interesting nugget of information!

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A Vision of Students Today

By richbradshaw | July 19, 2008


An interesting view into how students live today. I’m thinking that it depends what degree you study on how much work and classes you have to do - 3 hours of class + 2 hours work a day is much less than I did, and I only graduated last year!

Also, noone brought laptops to lectures - we didn’t use Facebook all through lectures, the material was much to complex to do that and still pass.

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5 mistakes new web developers often make

By richbradshaw | June 29, 2008
A graphical despiction of a very simple html document

Image via Wikipedia

Having talked to some university students who had taken computer science/IT degrees, I was amazed by how little they seemed to know about making anything that’s secure or even remotely logical. The group I met with primarily had been taught PHP. Having looked at some sites they were designing I realised 5 things that they had no idea they had done incorrectly, here’s a run down:

1. Don’t name your includes something.inc

Why it’s bad: Unless you specifically set .inc files to be parsed as php they are readable by just browsing to that page. Not good if we are talking about files that include the database username and password.

Easy way to fix: Name your includes .inc.php or put them in a folder called includes, and name them .php

Harder way to fix: Put a file named .htaccess in the directory with your .inc files, and add this line:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .inc

2. Don’t assume that because your site is small, it won’t be hammered by crackers

Why it’s bad: Although being hammered by crackers would be an unusual turn of events, for a website it’s inevitable. Bots exist with the sole purpose of cracking websites in order to add redirects to malware or spam to the site.

I built a small ruby site once, just as a test to see how it all worked. It had a comment form. I didn’t worry about sanatising the input, as I didn’t link to this site anywhere. Within a week there were about 4000 comments, all linking to spam. Luckily I hadn’t allowed javascript in the comments, so there wasn’t any evil redirections or anything, but the point is clear. Your site will be attacked.

How to fix: Read up on SQL injection and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). Use the PHP function mysql_real_escape_string to santise anything you are going to put into a database. Don’t allow html tags in your users input. Try to crack your site yourself - how would you do it?

3. Don’t just dump random code from tutorials into your site

Why it’s bad: I’ve seen sites before that link to 3 or 4 javascript frameworks, often to allow fancy animations and the like. This is fine, but there is a lot of crossover between them - I don’t see why you need more than one. These frameworks are pretty large - downloading even one to provide a trivial feature is questionable, but linking 3 or 4 is just madness.

Also, the golden rule of programming: if you don’t understand what code does, you probably shouldn’t be using it! (Caveat: unless it’s Perl - no one understands that!)

How to fix: Learn how to use javascript properly, or just stick to one framework.

4. Don’t ignore semantic design

Why it’s bad: It makes things harder for you. Honestly.

Using a semantic design means that headers are tagged using the H1, H2, H3 tags, paragraphs use p etc etc. Don’t inline style your headers with a font size and a font weight to get them larger and bold - use the way it’s designed to help you!

Use classes sensibly. Don’t put your red title in a class called redtitle - when you redesign the site that doesn’t make sense. Call it subtitle or something that describes what it is, not what it does.

Moving on from the basics, consider using technologies such as microformats to help you - these describe the information on your site more fully.

How to fix: Always separate content from presentation. Seperate CSS style sheets from HTML pages. Think about what purpose a page element serves, tag it appropriately and then use CSS to format it.

5. Don’t reinvent the wheel

Check what exists before you start. If you want to make a site, check out the existing tools: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc. all have a head start on you - it might make more sense to take their code and design from there.

If you are using ajax, use a javascript framework - as new browsers come out with different support you can simply upgrade the framework rather than having to deal with these inconsistancies yourself.

Of course, if you are starting something totally new, a blank slate is often the place to start, but don’t waste time on work that doesn’t need to be done.

Conclusion

So, there you go - 5 things that I have definitely done before and hopefully some sound advice for people starting out.

Any further ideas, add them to the comments!

Links

mysql_real_escape_string documentation
40 signs you really area lousy PHP programmer

Existing starting points

Drupal
Wordpress
Joomla

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Official Firefox 3 download counter

By richbradshaw | June 17, 2008

Head over to this page to see the official download counter, with sub division by countries. Currently it’s in 670,000, with 9700 downloads per minute…

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Twhirl Update (0.8.1i)

By richbradshaw | June 10, 2008

Here’s a new screenshot – shows seemic integration, not something I’m particularly excited about… Looks like it still has the scroll bug it used to have as well…

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Twhirl
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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

By richbradshaw | June 9, 2008

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Really interestingly made video, definitely worth watching!

Covers the history of the internet in a really creative way.

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Powerset: Find Factz, Get a T-shirt

By richbradshaw | June 8, 2008

The new semantic search tool for wikipedia, Powerset, have just announced a competition challenging users to find interesting “Factz” using their search tool.

So far, I’ve found:

Powerset: What eats humans?

What eats humans?

We have the usual: zombies, monsters and sharks, but the list also includes Catholics, foxes, streets and pigs…

Powerset: What do chickens like?

What do chickens like?

Only three things, potatoes, ham and tandoori. That’s good to know…

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Google Mail Labs now avaliable!

By richbradshaw | June 6, 2008
Google Inc.

Image via Wikipedia

Google have released a section in the settings tab of Gmail called labs. This was predicted by a few blogs recently, and it seems to have come true today.

The new labs section includes:

  • Quick Links: Add links to the sidebar for any bookmarkable page in Gmail. This lets you add custom searches, filters etc.
  • Superstars: More choices of star to mark messages.
  • Custom keyboard shortcuts: as it sounds!
  • Mouse Gestures: again, as it sounds!
  • Signature tweaks: lets you get rid of that annoying — before you signature, as well as allowing the signature to float above the reply.
  • Old Snakey: Play snake in gmail…

These features are all rather random, but it will be interesting to see if anything more interesting appears in here.

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