Ryan McMillan

Top 3 Reasons to Install the KinderTown Educational App Store

2011-11-20T14:24:00.001-06:00

KinderTown is a brand new app found in the iTunes App Store. The interesting thing is, it's essentially an App Store itself. KinderTown aggregates educational apps meant for 3, 4, 5 and 6 year olds.

It further separates them into subjects:

Math and Logic
Language
Art
Science
Social Studies

Being a parent of children aged 6, 3 and 1, I found this universal app(works on both iPhone and iPad) perfect for finding apps not only age appropriate but something that I knew was going to give them educational value. After all, all apps included in KinderTown are meticulously reviewed by childhood educators.

Here's my Top 3 Reasons to download and install KinderTown on your iOS device:

Saves You Time - Let's face it, we as parents are busy and our kids LOVE technology. The problem is if we don't take the time to find apps that have some educational value they WILL end up playing Angry Birds and watching Netflix and other time wasters. It allows parents to find educational applications with 2 clicks, that are geared toward their children's ages that will no doubt saves parents a bunch of time.
Saves You Money - Not only will KinderTown filter based on age and subject as I discussed earlier, but it will also filter free vs. paid apps. It's just a checkbox. So now you can be sure you are getting a great educational app without having to pay top dollar because you can find the great free ones as well.
Gives You Piece of Mind - KinderTown doesn't include a rating system because at the moment, it doesn't need one. According to their home page if the app doesn't give the absolute best experience and provide education value, its not inside of KinderTown. This gives parents a great piece of mind that the apps are not only age appropriate but will virtually guarantee they will learn something.

In closing KinderTown fills a much needed gap in the iTunes App Store. It gives you great educational applications that you know will save you time, money and give you piece of mind when selecting applications for your preschooler and Kindergartner.

KinderTown is completely free and available now in the iTunes App Store.

KinderTown Screenshots:

KinderTown Promotional Video:

Google Calendar Sync to Exchange for Google Apps Pilot

2011-11-09T14:12:00.002-06:00

As you know I'm piloting Google Apps for Education along with some of the other members of the ITS staff here at our school.

What I just realized is that if I exclusively use Google Apps for my Calendar, my Outlook calendar will never be up to date and anyone who looks at my calendar in Exchange won't get any of my new appointments I've been entering in Google.

I started searching for a sync tool and low and behold...I found this...

Google Calendar Sync

I'm happy to report it works perfectly, I set it up to sync 2-way every 2 hours. This way if I enter an appointment in Outlook it syncs to Google and vice versa.

Awesome!

Google Apps for Education - Dual Email Delivery with Exchange 2007

2011-11-07T21:12:00.000-06:00

Coming off the Midwest Google Apps Summit, I had an impromptu meeting with my tech team this morning to give them the low down on the conference and what I had learned and what was likely to come next.

After it was clear that I was completely enamored with GAFE, they too were ready to give it shot. It didn't take much convincing as we have a great team open to new ideas. So this afternoon, we signed up for our Google Apps Edu account to begin our internal ITS pilot.

We registered our main domain name and proceeded through the custom wizard to setup dual delivery with our Microsoft Exchange environment. It was quite simple and a really a pleasant surprise to go through the wizard.

We verified domain ownership through creating a simple TXT record in our external DNS. It took about 5 minutes for it to verify once the record was created. Then the wizard walked us through the dual delivery process for a "legacy" system. We happen to be using Exchange 2007.

At this point we had a choice. We could either create a "test" temporary domain, i.e. @gtest.domain.org or we could utilize a Google supplied test domain. Rather than create a test domain and create further DNS entries and MX records we opted just to utilize the Google supplied test domain that looks like our_domain.com.test-google-a.com.

Once this was in place we sent a few test emails to user@our_domain.com.test-google-a.com to verify delivery was working to the few ITS accounts we had setup for ourselves. Then we opened up the Exchange Management Console created External SMTP Contact accounts that were for our temporary test email accounts (user@our_domain.com.test-google-a.com) then we setup our accounts in Exchange to forward all mail to that new contact and also checked the box to deliver mail to the forwarding address and the exchange mailbox.

Then we simply sent a few test messages from externally and internally to test. BOOM! Dual delivery up and running. Total time spent 20 minutes.

Email is now being delivered to both Exchange and Google Apps Mail for our ITS staff. We also played around with the Google Apps for Outlook Migration plug-in to move e-mail out of our current Outlook into Apps Mail.

It should be noted that this is just one of the supported methods for dual delivery. Since we are just in the very early testing phases I didn't want to change any MX records for mail. That is why we choose this option. The other option involves routing all mail to Google first. Both methods are explained in more detail here on the Google Apps support site.

Tomorrow will configure more of the dashboard.

Midwest Google Summit 2011

2011-11-05T00:53:00.003-05:00

For the past two days I attended the Midwest Google Summit. Because of it, tonight I'm reviving my blogger account and I've truly been inspired to start blogging again about my journey through K-12 IT and all the fun that goes along with it.

The two day event focused solely on Google Apps for Education. More specifically how to deploy and integrate Google Apps into the classroom to promote student learning and achievement.

I learned so many different things but I thought I would summarize my top three for you here, and then show you to get access to many of the presentations that took place.

Google Apps for Education is probably one of the most simple implementations from the technical side you will ever encounter. Change the MX record for your mail, create a few cname DNS entries, upload your logo, create some users and you can literally be up and running. I look forward to setting this up with my team. We we finally be able to focus on activities that add value instead of worrying about the uptime of our in-house email system.
The collaboration tools included in Google Apps for Education (GAFE) make Google and K-12 a perfect match. No where else do I know where students and teachers can work together in real time on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, so seamlessly and effortlessly. It just works and it's amazing to see a student be able to get real time feedback from their peers and/or their teacher.
Students today are already digital citizens, it's time to turn them into digital learners. Without allowing them access to the technology within the school that they already have at home, they are at a disadvantage. A 10 year old student today has essentially grown up on the web, living a life that was never without text messages, online chat, online video and of course the web. By adopting these tools within the classroom we can begin to transform their education into one of creation, not just consumption.

There are so many more takeaways from the Summit, but these were three that stuck out in my head. If you weren't fortunate enough to be there, you can check out most of the presentations from the MWGS website on the Conference Sessions page.