Cool Tool to Make My Day

Today in the process of working with a 2nd grade teacher to setup a project where students can access and edit a Google Spreadsheet I came across a tool that made my day!  Turns out the tool has been around for a while but its new to me so I must share!  I found it on a Digital Learning Environments Blog post by Jim McDermott called Overcoming the email obstacle for student Google Accounts.

So what's the tool you ask?  Mailcatch.com

Why did it make my day?  As a technology integrator who works primarily with elementary students, using Web 2.0 tools that require an email address to sign up has always been an obstacle.  I've used Google Aliases before to create accounts but that didn't help me when it came to creating Google Accounts (my district does not participate in Google Apps for Education-but boy would I love it if they did!)

So in setting up the accounts and using Mailcatch.com here are some things I learned:

• See Jim's post for directions on how to create a Google Account with the Mailcatch email (which worked....some of steps were slightly different but it was close enough to figure it out!  -kudos Jim, it can be frustrating when directions are provided that don't even come close to actual steps.)

• The email address was case sensitive.  So when I tried to send an email to it to test I typed in all lowercase letters out of habit-not thinking it mattered and then waited and waited for an email that never came!  I tried again with the capitol letters where they should be and it came through immediately

•  You can't create, send emails or even forward the emails you received (not necessarily a bad thing but good to know going in!)

•  Only VERY recent emails remain in the Inbox - in fact once I left the Inbox and came back they were already gone - so make sure if you create an account using the Mailcatch.com email that you immediately go to the inbox and confirm.  Also - if you receive any emails you need to keep (like that Google verification that has a code you might need some day) - print to a PDF so you can keep a copy or write down any important information! The do provide a clipboard option where I thought I would be able to copy and paste the email into Word but in Firefox it didn't work.

• The benefits don't stop there!  Use the email address to create other classroom accounts.  I recommend to teachers that 5-6 accounts on a Web 2.0 tool for student use is a good place to start.  That way you have enough for centers or groups.  If you're feeling ambitions go ahead and make one for each student but maybe its a good ideas to make them generic i.e. TeacherNameStudentAccount1, TeacherNameStudentAccount2 etc. so you can reuse them each year instead of having to create new ones.  This is especially helpful for younger grades like 2nd or 3rd grade where you don't want to lose instructional time having students setup the accounts themselves.

Anyone else use Mailcatch.com or something similar?