Classic Google Sites going away (BOO!)

My Problem: I have been wrestling with my Classic Google Sites problem, along with my HTML editing-on-my-Mac problem (ever since my Dreamweaver software was no longer compatible with my version of MacOS... and then the open-source web page editor Compozer was discontinued). I have reached a point where I have a lot of decisions to make about my web presence, especially since I am officially retired. I want to continue making these resources available, but the WWW doesn't stand still and I'm not sure I have the energy to keep up. I am still maintaining my domain names and traditional web hosting platform, but it is becoming more difficult to balance the costs and benefits.

I am very irritated with Google, for abandoning (especially) many educational users. A major problem with electronic portfolios is the durability of platforms... forget about "ePortfolios for life" unless it is in raw HTML, which doesn't work for 99% of users. In my "online portfolio adventure" (https://electronicportfolios.org/myportfolio/) I started creating my online portfolio in 2004, and most of those versions are obsolete (either the service is shut down or I am unable to edit). There are some exceptions, but now my favorite, classic Google Sites, is going away.

I will work on converting some of my most important sites, and will need to make some decisions about my online strategy. If I were to continue my research, I think I would recommend a blogging platform (Blogger or WordPress/EduBlog) to manage "reflective journal" ePortfolios, recognizing that the Showcase ePortfolio is only temporary. One advantage of the open-source Mahara platform is that they incorporate the journal and the showcase in one tool... the disadvantage is the need for a server (or online service).

Questions I Have: Is there an "easy" way to convert Classic Google Sites and capture/maintain the navigation panes? I read that the new Sites does not convert tables. When Google "archives" my sites to my Google Drive in 2022, in what format will they be save? Raw HTML? Will the navigation structure be saved? Is there a third-party tool that will be more helpful than Google's built-in transition tool? I have a lot more questions, but I have just started my research.

Revised course plans (and travel plans)

Never again will I plan an international trip over Skype. Since before November 7, when the proposal was submitted, I have been working with the State Department's English Language Specialist Program to spend several weeks in Vietnam in March, because of the interest of a few English faculty members for training in electronic portfolios. I was told that the proposal was approved in February (but March was too soon to travel). Since then, I have been frustrated because I have not been able to get the details about my travel or the status of my visit. Until April 10, I was assured that they were waiting on final approvals, first from DC, then from a supervisor in Bangkok. A week ago, I applied for my travel Visa. Then, late on the night of April 10 on Skype, I was informed that an administrator in the Consulate has cancelled my trip. Still more approvals needed and paperwork to complete while classes are ending in early May. Oh, the bureaucracy! Now I need to figure out what I'm going to do for the next couple of weeks. Plant a garden? (posted to my Facebook account)

Instead, I spent some time last weekend revising two online course outlines:

• Introduction to K-12 ePortfolios
• K-12 ePortfolios with GoogleApps (I am also using this site for my workshops at the SC Midlands Google Summit in June and my ISTE 2012 Workshop in San Diego.)

The major change I made to both course sites was to provide an alternative to creating an Implementation Plan: creating a Professional Portfolio using the same course lessons:

1. Overview (What?) Define the context for developing your portfolio and assess your readiness for developing a professional ePortfolio, including your technology skill level.
2. Purpose (Why?) Identify the benefits (and your motivation) for creating your own professional portfolio and write your ePortfolio purpose/audience/vision statement.
3. Collection/Archive (How?) Create an online space to store your artifacts and identify the artifacts you have collected in digital form and how they will be organized in your portfolio. Identify the primary audience for your showcase portfolio.
4. Reflection/Blogs (How?) As part of this course, you have already established your own blog (learning portfolio/reflective journal). You could also develop a reflective digital narrative video to add voice to your portfolio (digital storytelling).
5. Presentation/Showcase (How?) Create a hyperlinked website as a showcase portfolio, organized thematically. By now, you should have selected the appropriate presentation portfolio tool. Options are blog pages (WordPress or Blogger), Google Sites, Weebly, Wikispaces, Mahara, etc. Reflect on each category of artifacts plus provide a reflective caption on each artifact.
6. Assessment/Feedback (How well?) Write your own self-assessment of your portfolio in your blog. Select one of the rubrics to guide your self-assessment. Share your portfolio link and ask for feedback.

Registration for the next cohort of my facilitated Introduction to K-12 ePortfolios course is open now and collaboration begins on May 1. Once a paid member of a facilitated course, participants are not automatically dropped from the course Google Group and may choose to continue learning with subsequent cohorts.

Google Hangouts Office Hours

I just finished my first virtual office hours for my online class using Google+ Hangouts. I set up a private circle just for the class, and invited my students to add me to one of their circles, whereupon I added them to the private class circle. I posted the schedule in the circle discussion and simply clicked on the hangout button at the bottom of the message. When they log in to Google+, they should see that I am online:
Pretty cool way to be available to students!

Downloaded Google Sites

I received an email today from an educator in China who cannot access my Google Sites. I found the software from Google to download my Google Sites, and I uploaded a few of my sites to my own web server:

• Introduction to ePortfolios in K-12 Schools
• Implement ePortfolios with Google Apps
• Implement ePortfolios with WordPress
• Implement ePortfolios with Mobile Devices
• Reflection for Learning

At least I now have a backup of these Google Sites as of the end of 2011. The content of the sites is alnost all there, but the navigation is not quite what appeared on the original Google Site. Any sub pages must be accessed from a link at the bottom of the main page, not from the navigation bar. Of course, most of the CSS formatting is missing. Access the Google Sites Liberation User Guide and download the software.

Using SMS in the e-portfolio process?

I am following an EPortfolio Conversations Google Group, where a question was raised about collecting evidence of informal learning rather than formal education. One response: "Start with SMS [on mobile phones] - its the morse code of the present generation...and it works." Here is my response:

Being a Baby Boomer, and only learning about SMS from my kids and grandkids, I need to learn more about how we can use SMS in ePortfolio development. I am doing a workshop at ISTE in Philadelphia in June entitled, "Hands-on mPortfolio Development with iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)." In all cases, there is a Web 2.0 website where we will post the artifacts and reflections "in real time".

Although smart phone ownership (Android, iOS) is growing, these tools are not widely owned by teenagers. Where does a student store SMS messages online? I know my teenage granddaughter updates her Facebook page with her "feature phone" but that is not an option for most schools. I am looking for the practical applications, because I am getting inquiries from educators in the developing world, where the plain old mobile phone is the tool students have available for Electronic Documentation of Learning? In my opinion, that is the first step in building an ePortfolio: collection of artifacts (in text, images, audio, video) and reflection on experiences/artifacts (in any of those same formats).

Maybe we could learn from what Google is doing in Egypt right now: providing local telephone numbers to call; the service simply delivers a link on Twitter so you can hear the actual voice message! In the U.S., Google Voice messages can be saved as MP3, and imperfectly translated into text. (I heard of one teacher who sits in his car--his quiet recording studio--and records his reflections as a voice message in Google Voice.) What else? I am looking for a blog-like tool that can be updated by a plain mobile phone. What Web 2.0 tools, besides Facebook, are accessible from SMS? After a little research, I found instructions for posting from SMS to Blogger and WordPress, but it looks like this service is only available within the USA. I suppose Posterous would work as well, if the message comes in as an email. You can also use SMS to post to Twitter.

Changes to GoogleDocs

 
Announced today: This video says it well. Also, the TechCrunch post today: Google Docs Gets More Realtime; Adds Google Drawings To The Mix. You know, I saw the Drawing icon when I signed in to Google Docs this morning. Now I see what it means. It just keeps getting better and better! Thanks, Google! My next collaborative ePortfolio planning workshops are going to be a lot more fun! And the output will be a lot more visual!
Official GoogleDocs Blog Post

Blogger discontinuing FTP support

Today, Blogger announced that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. I have been publishing this blog to my own web server since May 2004, using FTP almost from the beginning because, at the time, I didn't want ads on my blog (no longer an issue). Now, I need to make a decision... do I host this blog as a blogspot.com address (not accessible on a lot of school networks), or do I host it on a custom domain (I have a couple of them that I am not using), or do I transfer the whole thing over to WordPress.com (not possible in the current FTP format)? So, I have a few weeks to make a decision... but I will be doing a lot of traveling between now and the end of March (New York, India, New Zealand, Sedona). I will post my decision soon, and will do the appropriate re-directing on my web server. Still, it is irritating, at a time when I am going to be very busy!

My Google Storage Activated

I woke up this morning to this message on my Google Docs page:

So, I found the three files that I have been using in my study of online storage systems, and uploaded them to my Google Docs account.  There were two PDF files (Google Docs has been able to store PDFs for the last year) and one 10MB MP3 file of my presentation at a conference. I proceeded to experiment based on instructions in a website that I recently found: How to Embed MP3 Audio Files In Web Pages With Google or Yahoo! Flash Player. I used the code for the Google Reader player, and I embedded it on a demo Google Site I was using for a class. It took a couple of tries, because I don't think Google is supporting the embedding of MP3 files, but I made it work by tweeking the download URL on the Google Docs download page for that document (removed the download suffix on the URL).

I read a comment in the Google Docs blog entry about this document storage feature:

Euripides said... An update- I was told after uploading one of my podcasts that "sorry, we do not currently support MP3 files"

Obviously! The process I went through worked, but it was not for the faint of heart (or those who don't understand URL codes). I hope that there will be a gadget soon, that will make this process seamless, just like embedding YouTube videos. Using divshare.com to embed audio with a player is much easier!

Google Online Storage...Finally!

Today, the Official Google Docs Blog announced "the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs." Finally! (at least some time over the next couple of weeks)

...you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year...

According to the response to questions in the Comments in this blog entry, the additional storage is shared between Picasa Web Albums, Gmail and Google Docs. The cost is described on this page. Picasa (images) provides 1 GB free storage, GMail provides 7+ GB free, and now GoogleDocs provides 1 GB free. You can't share free storage between applications, but if you upgrade even the smallest amount (20 GB for $5 per year), you can use that extra storage in any of those tools.

The Google Enterprise Blog Entry indicates that this capability is available to GoogleApps users (also for GMail accounts). For now, the Documents List API will only be available to GoogleApps Premiere domains (what about Education Edition?).

Assuming this functionality is available to Education accounts, for ePortfolios, we finally have our digital archive that will hold any type of file. GoogleDocs Folders can also be shared. I can hardly wait to see how it works. Will the files have an Embed code? Are they individually linkable? I am specifically looking for the ability to embed audio files, much as we can do with YouTube videos. Will it be easy enough for a primary student to use??? Some of the comments in the blog are asking for a DropBox-type of interface (synchronize contents of folders). I agree!

UPDATE: In response to public requests, Google increased the maximum file size to 1 GB while also adding a Thumbnail view to your GoogleDocs Home page (Documents List). 

T.H.E. Article on E-Portfolios

This article, published by T.H.E. Journal provides a shallow overview of e-portfolios in K-12 schools, mostly providing an incomplete look at the types of tools available. The author also made the following statement:

Google is probably the leading provider of mashup services and software for the creation of e-portfolios. The search giant isn't yet offering an e-portfolio product, per se, but in 2007 it began publishing a step-by-step process for combining its Google Apps software into e-portfolio mashups. On its "Google Apps E-Portfolios Mashup" web page, the company has published a series of documents describing how to mash up such applications as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Notebook, Blogger, and the iGoogle portal to, essentially, create an e-portfolio.

Google is also providing guidance specifically aimed at K-12 education. The company has published descriptions of three levels of K-12 e-portfolios: e-portfolio as storage; e-portfolio as workspace; and e-portfolio as showcase.

Lowendahl [Garner Group] is pleased to see Google getting into the e-portfolio business. He says interest from companies of such stature is necessary to secure the application's future.

I agree, it would be nice if Google was getting into the e-portfolio business, but they aren't. What the author is referencing is MY website. Here is the comment that I added to the article:

 This article provides interesting information about e-portfolios, although some of it is inaccurate and incomplete. It is true that most of the research and implementation of electronic portfolios has been in higher education. My reading of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Education, 2009, noted that ePortfolios were listed in the stage of "Sliding Into the Trough" (...of Disillusionment). To move to the next stage of the cycle (Climbing the Slope... of Enlightenment) we will need to have more research on the most appropriate strategies and "best practices" to support student learning, especially at the K-12 level.

Your reference to Google's support of ePortfolios was actually posted on MY website (http://electronicportfolios.org/google/ ). I wrote the K-12 support materials for both GoogleApps (and WordPress), linked from my web page (http://electronicportfolios.org/ and published using Google Sites). I developed the three-level model, based on my collaboration with both Washington State University and several school districts in California and Texas:
1. portfolio as storage (collection of artifacts)
2. portfolio as workspace (collection plus reflection/metacognition)
3. portfolio as showcase (selection, summative reflection and presentation)

It is also important to recognize that reflection is the "heart and soul" of a portfolio... not the technology or collection of artifacts. The real value of an e-portfolio is in the reflection and learning that is documented therein, not just the collection of work.

My note to the author: To whom at Google do I send the bill for all my development work over the last two years? ;-)

UPDATE: After having a nice conversation with the author, the online article was corrected to read:

Google is probably the leading provider of mashup services and software for the creation of e-portfolios. The search giant isn't yet offering an e-portfolio product, per se, but in 2007 educator Helen Barrett, who has been researching strategies and technologies for e-portfolios since 1991, began publishing a step-by-step process for combining Google Apps software into e-portfolio mashups. On her "Google Apps E-Portfolios Mashup" web page, she describes how to join such applications as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Notebook, Blogger, and the iGoogle portal to create an e-portfolio.

Barrett also provides guidance specifically aimed at K-12 education. She has published descriptions of three levels of K-12 e-portfolios: e-portfolio as storage; e-portfolio as workspace; and e-portfolio as showcase.

Google storage changes

Yesterday I received a notice from Google that my online storage of GMail and Picasa photos was being changed from $20 to $5 per year, or my storage allocation was increased to 80 GB for the same $20. Needless to say, I reduced my service until I find out what might be on the horizon in terms of Google storage. Might I soon be able to store more than just email and photos? Does this mean that Google's long-rumored web drive is about to appear? 80 GB would be well worth $20/year, and there were additional levels for additional fees, up to 16 terabytes (for over $4,000/year). The possibilities are exciting for my work in lifelong portfolios. Hmmmm....
Sent from my iPhone

Teaching a course with open tools

This week, I am beginning to team-teach a graduate course for Seattle Pacific University entitled, "Issues and Advances in Educational Technology" using a Google Site for the course content and a private Google Group for the class discussions.  David Wicks (my co-developer) and I thought it would be important for students to not only study these advances at a theoretical level, but also to experience these emerging technologies on a practical level. We also thought we should use tools that are free for teachers to implement in their classrooms. We are also using web-based readings rather than a textbook for the course content.

We recognize that there is a steeper learning curve with this approach, especially with most other SPU courses being implemented within Blackboard... but few schools use Blackboard. We are simply replacing desktop computer-based tools (bookmarks, word processing, web page authoring) with Internet-based tools (delicious.com, GoogleDocs, Google Sites). We are encouraging our graduate students to think about the application of these tools to their own situations in their classrooms.

We also wanted to model the collaboration that is possible using Google Sites: we kept most of our comments on the pages where we discussed the content and development process of the course as it was being constructed. We also set up a Notes on Development page, using the Announcements page type in Google Sites, as a journal or page (with entries organized in reverse-chronological order) where we documented our development process... much like a blog without RSS feeds.

Speaking of RSS feeds... when you are a member of a Google Site, you can go to More Actions and Subscribe to Page Changes (for the page you are on) or Subscribe to Site Changes (for the entire site). Any time a change is made to the page or site, you will receive an email showing the changes. For collaborative projects, this feature is essential! But it can add significantly to your email volume. So, we provided advice to our students on how to manage email from this class. We will be asking the students for feedback on the process and using these open tools, and I will blog about the process periodically over the semester.

Group Brainstorming with GoogleDocs

I have been doing a brainstorming activity for a while with groups, but yesterday, it was especially productive. I was doing a workshop on e-portfolios at a community college. We spent the morning exploring issues of e-portfolio development in a large group, lecture-style. After lunch, we moved to a computer lab, where I led them through several exercises to help them put together a plan for implementation. I did an almost identical set of exercises in my workshop in New Hampshire in August, but it took a lot longer because then we were using pen and paper.

On Friday, I had the participants organize in groups (sitting together around a person who had a Google account). Each team gave themselves a name. Then I had each team set up a GoogleDoc to store their brainstorming ideas, sharing these documents with me and the person in the organization who was responsible for the meeting, who needed a record of all of their work… I just needed to share their results on the projector so all could see. It is so much more efficient than paper and pencil or flipcharts and markers. I know this is not an original idea… it just worked so well for me, especially when they shortened my afternoon workshop by one hour (so that participants could avoid Friday afternoon traffic in Boston… I soon found out what they meant as I made my way toward the airport!)

Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!

Today, the leader of Google's Data Liberation Front announced his team's efforts to "allow users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions." As explained in the blog entry,

... a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere....

We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).

This feature has huge implications for using Google tools for ePortfolio development.  Just as they announced last month that you could transfer a Google Site from a GoogleApps for Education domain to another Google account you own, this looks like a systemic approach to data portability, to transfer data out of Google, should you so choose.  This is an open standards approach which will be interesting to watch. The only thing is... where else would I put that data? Are other cloud computing companies going to follow suit?