One of the nicest thing about my job is that I get enthused and passionate about what I’m doing every single day! Yesterday, my wonderful colleague and partner-in-crime Katie searched through the depths of her emails and bookmarks and came across a stroke of genius! The little hack she uncovered helped solve one of my small (but persistent!) frustrations with teaching grade 2-4 students.
I am very much into Web 2.0 tools, yet have found many of the great and exciting ones out there require an email log in. Currently, students are not issued with email accounts through the school, and although I support each child having an email address, I can also understand some of the reticence surrounding the decision not to issue them at school.
Katie found that Robby Stein (Associate Product Marketing Manager for Gmail) created this post on March 5th, 2008, entitled ‘2 hidden ways to get more from your Gmail address‘, which contained the following:
Append a plus (“+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.
So what that means is I can have a Gmail account which is accessible only by me, but that the students can piggyback off, so as to sign in to various Web 2.0 tools. I tested this out by registering to ToonDoo using the following format: myemail+student1@gmail.com and myemail+student2@gmail.com to see if ToonDoo accepted registrations from what is essentially the same email address. Success! They did!
This has opened up a world of possibilities for me, as I can now use the tools I am so fond of without the stress of dealing with 100-odd different emails. Phew!
I am SOOoOOooOOo excited!
Tip of the Iceberg 
Hi Keri-Lee!
Thanks for the comment on the blog. Interestingly, I had issues with Voicethread around comments when I used it as well. I hadn’t gone over appropriate behaviour expectations and kids left nasty comments about others on the Voicethreads (which were deleted immediately and letters of apology written). We are always learning as we go 🙂 Thanks for this gmail hack. I have actually already tried this one but the activation link I got from Pixton wouldn’t work so I couldn’t use it 😦 I have set up an account with each of my three email accounts and have a powerpoint activity lined up to go along side it this time. I am doing this again tomorrow – will let you know how it goes 🙂
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