So You're Married Now

Google Apps for Edu is being widely adopted by an education community recognising the capacity of collaboration to improve outcomes for organisations. This is a developing ecosystem with some of the administration tasks we have been used to with active directory taking place in different ways with different tools. This can be complicated when organisations decommission exchange servers in favour of this cloud-based solution. One of the teachers at my school got married and took her husband's name. We wanted to change her name while retaining all of her documents and e-mail. We have been using Google-sync but needed now to change the account name in Google before resynching  to it with an alias address so that she could receive mail from people using her maiden name.

Changing names

The product we used is the Google Apps Manager. There are a couple of steps to installation and then you need to follow the syntax examples to ensure that the naming you want takes place. We did this to rename the teacher with a new married name after which we could connect to her correctly from active directory where we also changed her name. I wasn't aware of the ability to create an e-mail alias using the same utility but it is there. This your only option that I know about should you have decommissioned your exchange server like we have. Good luck and I look forward to hearing your Google apps manager stories.

Start here at the wiki

100 Hour Challenge

I am undertaking a hundred hour challenge.
I will be blogging about this to report progress.

• Ewan McIntosh’s Challenge
• What is my Challenge?
• Why this Challenge?
  

Ewan McIntosh Laid out a hundred hour challenge

Don't just read this post. Do something.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours starting at some point in the next twelve months. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 7 hours a week for 14 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one term out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks (or listen to them online) and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone reading this can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask your friends, colleagues and students what their’s is. Find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Full blog post link

And mine is … D R U M   R O L L please

What is it?

The stakes are high because I have chosen to help my son Jack who wants to publish a book.
I am reading, talking with him and finding out about him a little more. We are working in online spaces
and face to face. Who’d have thought collaborating with each other in the same house and much of it online.

This is Jack.

Why this Challenge?
Jack has always written and I have not always read this writing. As a parent I have often been too busy and perhaps too self absorbed. This was an opportunity to give time to Jack around a mutual interest. I believe that young people are capable of more than we give them credit for. Jack’s story was over 60 pages when I suggested the challenge. A barrier to taking this further is an audience an editor and a mentor. I have decided to become involved, is this a good decision? When someone’s passions are at stake any mentor coach has the ability to make or break motivation.
We will see ….

Here are a couple of extracts form Jack’s Writing

Shaking my head, I tried to rid the noise from my ears like an animal tries to rid a fly from its back.

I was hardly aware of my body slipping down the slope, rolling over rubble and rocks as my eyes closed shut, and my ability to stay conscious abandoned me.