Category: google

Are Google planning to put Google Wave into Google Apps?

Posted on by primaryt

Google Apps is becoming more and more popular in schools, mostly due to the Free education edition and ability to use the Shibboleth Authentication mechanism.

On the 29th of September Google Wave released a blog post which highlighted the fact that Google Wave would be available to Universities before the general public.
Google Apps is a profit generating tool for Google so it is in their best interest to include Wave and improve their product. Google Enterprise announced on their blog that they will be bringing Wave to Apps at some point in 2010. An educated guess means that Google Wave will find its way to Google Apps Education Edition in June 2010.

Educational success in hours per year on a website

Posted on by primaryt

One way to look at the success of an educational site is to look at the amount of time in a year spent by users on that site. Below is exactly that.

Total hours since Nov 2,2008:

School Email = 7,806 hours
School Safe Search = 1,894 hours
Primary Games Arena = 1,154 hours
Primary Technology = 771 hours
Primary Blogger = 770 hours
Primary School Teaching (Opened May 2009) = 408 hours
School Closures (Opened Sep 2009) = 84 hours
McLear(My Blog) = 63.7 hours

Thanks to google analytics we can get this information.

I have being able to use this information to explain the real time importance of the sites to their teams. For example if I say to a coder the website has 400 visits a day it doesn’t sound as impressive as if I say..

“The website gives 10 hours of educational help every single day…”

Primary School Teaching has served 2+ hours worth of resources every day, for a website purely built by a community of educators I think our hats go off to teachers for being part of a sharing, web2 community.
Of course if your website is purely designed then a user will struggle to get to the resource they need, we know that isn’t the case here – our users tend to come, find one thing then continue to browse around the site looking for useful resources. Are teachers and learners naturally inquisitive?

Barcode scanning in the kitchen – The reality..

Posted on by primaryt

I wanted to give barcode scanning a chance so I went downstairs and tried the most obvious thing to scan, a bottle of copella juice. It got the product and did it’s thing.. Great!

So I tried some old paprika in a jar, few years old so fail 🙁
Then I tried some cumin from tesco – no luck with that so I figured maybe there was a problem so I gave it something easy to scan..
A carton of eggs bought last week from tesco, surely this staple food will come up as a recognised by froogle? Shockingly it didn’t…
The room in my house with the most amount of barcodes in and the tool failed me 🙁
At what point will barcode scanning tools recognise the majority of none electrical goods? Who are we waiting for on this? The major supermarkets? Maybe it’s just tesco who are really bad at publishing their products on froogle or maybe froogle isn’t penetrating enough online food stores to get databases (using base or whatever they chose to use)?

Webmaster Tools tab Gadget broken by google

Posted on by primaryt

All of my webmaster tabs have been broken by googles latest update to the Webmaster Tools set 🙁 Nothing is showing up in igoogle and when i try add new gadgets it just brings through the whole page and not the important parts I need 🙁

Is everyone else experiencing the same level of fail?

Does anyone know if Google broke the webmaster gadgets?