Yes, No, Maybe? Conduct Opinion Polls Over Email using Gmail

Downloads email from POP3 accounts and delivers it to Exchange users. www.exchangepop3.com

In some situations, a poll conducted over email may be more practical than running a web based poll because readers can vote through their email clients without requiring a browser.

It’s as simple as replying to any other email and can be done even from mobile phones.

Turn Gmail into a Poll Software

Let’s see how you can quickly setup an opinion poll over email using only your existing Gmail account. The suggested approach will work best for polls that have a single question as in the following examples:

a. Will you buy a Macbook Tablet ? (Yes No Maybe).
b. Which is your favorite search engine? (Google Yahoo Ask Cuil Other).

In this example, we’ll ask a standard question “What’s your gender” with two choices - male or female.

Step 1: Compose a new email in Gmail, make the question as your subject and put the choices in the message body.

Step 2: Now convert each of the choices into hyperlinks that link to your email address but with an alias.

For instance, if your email address is hello@gmail.com, you can make the choice “Female” as an hyperlink for hello+female@gmail.com as in the image below. Repeat this for the other “male” choice.

Step 3. We are done creating the basic poll in Gmail. You can now send this email poll to a mailing list or type the addresses manually in the BCC: field but make sure you don’t exceed Gmail’s limit on sending email.

Step 4: The next step is to create Gmail filters so that email containing votes don’t clutter your main Inbox. Also, filters will save you from the hassle of manually counting the number of responses received for every choice.

A filter would look something like this:

“hello+female@gmail.com” in the To: field, apply the Label “Poll: Female” and check “Skip the Inbox”.

Create a separate filter for the “male” choice. You are now all set.

And if you are sending this poll to a very large group, consider creating a No Spam filter in Gmail to prevent any valid responses from hitting the Spam folder.

Prevent Gmail from Marking your Important Emails as Spam

Open Source Mail Client, Calendar Contacts, Easy Install, Free zimbra.com

False positives in Gmail are rare but not non-zero and there’s always a possibility that an important email may miss your Inbox because Gmail filters have marked that message as spam.

And when you get hundreds of spam messages each day, extracting those legitimate emails from spam gets all the more tough.

There’s some hope as Gmail has included a new "Never Send it to Spam" option in their filter that allows you to set rules for messages that should never be marked as spam.

For instance, if you work for IBM, you could say that any message with "ibm.com" in the To: field should not be classified as spam.

Thus you’ll never miss any important email from your boss.

Draft Suggests That Government Promote Blogging in Indian Schools

About rule of law, participation & dissent, in civil societies www.america.gov

If the recommendations made in the national policy on use of technology in Indian schools go through, blogging could become huge in India.

The draft recommends that Internet access be provided in all schools and that students be encouraged to blog as part of curriculum.

This draft policy, still under discussion, says - “Blogs are powerful tools to support creative writing that can be published and shared not only with the teacher but also with peers and the world, alike.”

The document will be submitted to the Ministry of Human Resources under Government of India. And this particular recommendation on use of blogs in school education as a “tool to support creative writing” was originally made by Shuchi Grover in this paper [pdf].

Update (August 06, 2008): Shuchi Grover responds to the Mint story:

Pallavi, I am thrilled to see quotations and suggestions from my paper “Technology as a Tool and Enabler in the post-NCF 2005 Constructivist Classroom in India” that I submitted in response to a call for papers to help draft a National Policy for ICT in School Education.

I have to clarify though that these are quotes and suggestions from my paper and NOT the draft policy, so your article has misrepresented facts, besides omitting to cite the correct source of your quotes. All the technology tools that you have alluded to- blogging for creative writing, spreadsheets, databases, concept maps, hypermedia & the “use of digital devices like robotics kits, digital microscopes, graphing calculators and GPS devices for science, math and social sciences curricula” come from my paper and NOT the “draft compendium”. I do not even know if these recommendations are being considered for implementation in actual Policy!

You may be interested to know that I was invited to a meeting of educationists at NCERT as a follow-up to this - academics and educationists who have unfortunately been sidelined from this process of drafting a National Policy. The process described on the CSDMS website, has saddened several luminaries in the field of education in India, and we are hoping, jointly, as a group, that we will be able to influence the process better than large corporations with vested interested who the MHRD is looking to instead. This group includes, among others Dr. Krishna Kumar, Padma Sarangapani, Poonam Batra, Anjali Noronha, Rohit Dhinkar & Vinod Raina. Read this article by Gurumurthy K.

I expect you to publish a revised version of this article with corrections, without omissions and certainly with appropriate acknowledgments. Thanks!

Shuchi Grover
Educational Technologist
http://educatorslog.in
http://shuchi-edblog.blogspot.com

Buy Books for Kindle from Amazon Store without a US Billing Address

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Amazon is not shipping Kindle Reader outside the US but you can always ask your cousin there to get a Kindle for you on her next trip to India.

But there’s another problem. You need a credit card with a US billing address if you were to buy any book, magazine or newspaper for reading on Kindle from the Amazon store.

Worry no more as Kindle user Stephanie has found an easy workaround to this problem - Amazon Gift cards.

The trick is that you buy a Gift Certificate at Amazon using your international Credit Card and then make a purchase for Kindle using this gift certificate. See nerdgirl for the steps.

Amazon Store policy is that when you redeem an Amazon Gift Card, any available balance is used for your Kindle store purchase before your credit or debit card gets charged. This does the trick for Kindle uses outside US.

Another important point - If you are based in USA, books and newspapers are delivered wirelessly to your Kindle Reader but since this feature is not available in other countries, you can download Kindle purchases from the Media Library on Amazon.com and transfer them to Kindle via a USB cable.

Run Traceroute Command from Computers in Multiple Locations

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The traceroute command, known as tracert in Windows, helps you figure out the amount of time it takes for your computer to reach any website. You can also identify the path taken by Internet packets to reach the destination server starting from your local machine.

This command can also come handy when you are trying to identify the problem that’s preventing you from accessing a site.

Just-Traceroute is a new service for running the traceroute command online but what’s unique here is that it runs the command in parallel on four different computers that are located in Singapore, US, Netherlands and Australia.

What you’ll also like about Just Traceroute is their email forwarding feature. You can directly send the output of traceroute command to any email address without having to copy-paste data from the console window.

And since the tracert command is executed simultaneously on four different terminals, the additional data will also help you while troubleshooting network problems

Camtasia Relay: Professors Can Record & Post Lectures on iTunes

Video screen capture software and tutorials. Launch Special $29.95 www.CamStudioPro.com

The developers of Camtasia Studio have launched Camtasia Relay, it’s a new software for educators and companies to record PowerPoint presentations or training sessions and distribute them in various formats.

Camtasia Relay has two components - the desktop client (available for Mac and Windows) that handles the recording part and a server component that produces this video recording in different formats like iPod, Windows Media, etc.

You press the record button your desktop screen to start the recording process. When you are done, stop the recording and the video is instantly sent to the server for further processing and distribution.

Unlike the desktop based Camtasia Studio, Camtasia Relay has a simple recording interface but requires a server (running Windows Server 2003) that takes care of producing and distributing your videos in almost real time.

Professors may use Camtasia Relay to record and post their classroom lectures on the web including iTunes as the software can create RSS feeds as well. In fact, you may choose to distribute the same video in different formats simultaneously as in the screenshot below.

Camtasia Relay is free during the beta period. If you are a corporate or associated with the education industry, you may want to check this out.

Camtasia Relay Apply for Beta Video Demo

Microsoft trueSpace: Free Alternative to 3ds Max, Google Sketchup

trueSpace is a 3D modeling and animation software for Windows that lets you create realistic 3D scenes from scratch, walk-throughs, games, etc. You can also import characters created in other software like AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Adobe Illustrator, etc.

trueSpace used to sell for $600 but then Microsoft acquired the company and released trueSpace as a free download probably in response to SketchUp that’s owned by Google.

The idea is to let users create building and landscapes for Virtual Earth just like one can use SketchUp to create 3D models for Google Earth (SketchUp review).

If you are from the education community, you’ll especially love trueSpace for simulations.

Like with any other 3D authoring software, there’s a steep learning curve involved with trueSpace but if you are looking for a good alternative to 3DS Max or Blender, Microsoft trueSpace is available at a price that may be hard to beat.