Courtney -

Ok, here's how the gmail trick works:

And note, the email all still flows through your account, so the kids don't have individual accounts and can't check their own accounts - if you want individual email accounts, I'd suggest http://epals.com. This trick is great for signing kids up for services (edublogs, wikispaces, etc) where a unique email is required for each account.

For gmail:

if your account is courtney@gmail.com, then your students (Amy, John, and Sara) would be:

courtney+amy@gmail.com
courtney+john@gmail.com
courtney+sara@gmail.com

and so on. All you need to do is add + and then the name or other identifier before the @ sign. You can do this as many times as you want!

Let me know if you have any more questions about it :-)

Courtney - I would look for posts/help on here for Google Apps, that sounds like what you need. I don't currently use this, so can't offer much assistance. Do a search, I'm sure you'll find something!

Hi,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this classroom20 network is no exception. (I've also sent this out on other Ning networks you may be a part of.) My name is Alyshia Olsen; I am a 20 year old college student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin College students (we're in Needham,MA, and engineering students) who has taken a year off to work on an education related project. I found you when I searched for middle schools on classroom20, and since our project is specific to middle schools, I thought you might be interested! Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

Under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum and other web tools, we hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools want to pilot and use at their schools, while allowing individual teachers to implement this tool in their own classroom.

Our project, titled Alight Learning, is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975. We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start.

Feel free to email me back, check out alightlearning.com, anything you like!

Thanks,

Alyshia Olsen
anotherdayaway42@gmail.com