Did you Know About Gmail +1?

A lot of the sites I feature require a log in and or registering with an email.  I know that this can be a dangerous area for many school districts due to the legal issues associated with school-sponsored emails, cyberbullying, etc.  So today I wanted to share one of the solutions to this problem that I use.

If you want your students to sign up for a Web 2.0 site such as Animoto, Prezi, Toon Doo, etc, you can sign up for a free Gmail account.  If you sign up for a Gmail account, say penguinsslide@gmail.com [NOT ACTUAL EMAIL!...At least, not an email where you can contact me], you automatically get access to a plus-one feature.  This means that you can use your Gmail account as many different email accounts, simply by adding "+1".  For example: penguinsslide+1@gmail.com is seen as a different email from penguinsslide+2@gmail.com.

You could assign a different +number to each student in your class so they could each have "their own" email!

The best part about all this is that while each email with a different +number is seen as individual, all emails sent to that address get sent to the main email: penguinsslide@gmail.com.  You, being the only one with the password to the account, are the only one able to check the email.  While this makes for quite a few emails to check for account activation, it ensures that your students are not getting any inappropriate email.

Try it out and leave me a comment to let me know what you think!  If you have any questions, just email me!

Future Me - Time Traveling Through Email

Here's a really cool site: Future Me.  Use it to send an email to yourself in the future!  The time span can be days, weeks, months, even years (up to 2061)!  All you do is compose an email to your future self and the site will keep it until the the delivery date that you choose.  The only trick is to make sure that you send the email to an address that you are most likely to still have in that all-mysterious future....possibly a gmail, yahoo, or hotmail account instead of a work account.
 

Possible uses for this in your classroom?  Have your students write emails to themselves with goals for the school year.  Did they accomplish in June what they were hoping to accomplish in September?  What about freshman students writing to themselves as seniors?  What would they say to themselves?

One note: you may want to add "mailer@futureme.org" to your non-spam list since that is the address from which your email will be delivered.

Disposable Email

What a beautiful North Country day today, right?  Yuck!

Anyway, getting right to business, I have a website today that is a perfect solution for a lot of us.  Don't you hate how you find a neat site, and then have to register for it using an email?  A lot of times, you have to worry about getting spam delivered to whatever email you use.  Well, mailcatch.com is your answer.  Simply put in any mailbox name you can think of, then @mailcatch.com, for example 1234554321@mailcatch.com.  Then, you can go to the mailcatch site, put in your mailbox name and check for the confirmation email to activate whatever account you're starting.  After that, you will never have to worry about checking the mailcatch account again, because it's deleted after a short time!

One tip: try to use something unique, because ANYONE can use this site.  If you use something simple like 1234@mailcatch.com, you may find some other emails in the inbox from people who have used the same address.

MailCatch

Keep this site in mind, because it may come in handy for future "Sites of the Day".