Kevin Brookhouser

If your Google account happens to be one of the billion Internet passwords The New York Times just reported to have been amassed by a Russian gang, then your docs, your mail, and your puppy photos are in the hands of a ... well ... Russian gang. Unless you have 2-Step Verification turned on. We have no idea if any of these passwords are actually Google accounts, but really it makes no difference. The password system for proving that you are you is completely broken. Almost all passwords are weak even when websites say they're strong. If your password doesn't look like this ... 8.;=>#qH->8'6Mv  ... it's weak. If it does look like that, then it's only secure as long as the Russian gang or any other hacker hasn't stolen it. So far, the best way to protect your accounts is to use 2-Step Verification . With 2-Step, access to your account requires not only something you know (password), but also something you have (your phone). After you have it tur...

Now that the Google black bar is gone (or going away), many of us are upset because it now takes two clicks to go from Gmail to Google Calendar, when it used to take only one. There are Chrome extensions that allow users to modify the app launcher, but they're still not as fast as using the old black bar. My solution is to use the "Startup on" settings in Chrome. First I open up all the tabs I want to access quickly every day. Then I click the settings hamburger in Chrome > Settings. In the "On startup" menu, I select, "Open a specific set of pages" > "Set pages" > "Use current pages." Then I pin those tabs so they're permanent and out of the way. This works great for me. No more crying. Here's a video.

On Tuesday, September 17, I'm going to be giving a talk for The Carmel Library Foundation as a part of the Jack & Peggy Baskin Parent Lecture Series. Teachers who know about #20time, I need your help. Why does #20time make you optimistic about the future? Leave a comment or post it in this form. Loading...

Last year, in an attempt to open our minds to what a 20% Project could be, we took part in The Bad Idea Factory. Here's the original post . Since then, I 've been sharing TBIF with other teachers, and others have found it to be a useful activity including Karl Lindgren-Streicher . This week was TBIF week for York 10th graders again. Here is a sample of some of their worst ideas.

Here are some of the topics I reference in this session on #20time at the Fairfax GAFE Summit . Other resources: Letter to my students and parents about #20time Limbo Dan Pink's Drive The Candle Problem The Bad Idea Factory My TEDx Talk on #20time Template for the Formal Project Proposal More to come ...

If you’re like me, you have several random Google accounts, like so many perfectly functional but rarely used pants hanging in your digital closet. You could delete your account , but that probably feels too painful. I know I have several accounts I cannot get rid of because I use them at least once a week. These extra accounts aren’t really a problem, and switching among them all is easy . The problem with them now is when people start looking for you on Google+. How often have you searched a name and found three different profiles, all for the same person? How do you choose which one to circle? I would love for Google to find an elegant way to merge all of these profiles, but I can imagine how insanely complicated that would be with tons of privacy implications. So, until that gets sorted out, I have two recommendations for people who have multiple Google+ accounts. 1. Use only your personal profile.   Sure, you have a different identity for the different accounts. One ...

You found this blogpost, so you are probably (a) an educator and (b) relatively tech-savvy, so why don’t you own your own domain name yet? The world of domain name ownership has changed, so step up your teaching game and buy your own domain name. 1. Getting one is simple and cheap. Purchasing a domain used to be difficult, but many new domain services make the process painless and inexpensive. The first place many people try is the sleazy godaddy.com. Gender politics aside, the process of purchasing through godaddy takes about as long as an AP Chemistry test. There are several much simpler and more palatable services that sell domain names including networksolutions.com . My favorite is hover.com , which sells domain names for $15 per year and offers amazing phone tech support. They’re not paying me, but if they did happen to want to sponsor the Google Educast , I’m sure Dan would take your call! Hover is great because of its simplicity. I can setup a domain, and in a few minutes...

One of the several unpopular assignments I force upon my students is the Sophomore Speech. I am capitalizing Sophomore Speech because it has become a thing at our school … a proper thing. Every single one of my 10th grade students is required to write a personal essay and convert it into a speech to be delivered in front of the entire school during our assembly period we call Break. The word speech has fallen out of fashion these days. It’s much cooler to give a talk than a speech, but talk doesn’t alliterate with sophomore . I guess I could have called them 10th Grade Talks, but as I said, the Sophomore Speech is a thing, so I’m going with it. Of course, I don’t win many votes for Most Popular Teacher of the Year when I announce this assignment to my students. Most members of our species tend to avoid public speaking whenever possible, and you won’t be surprised to hear that some students consider this the waterboard of English assignments. “Mr. Brookhouser, I real...

If your students use a shared computer, encourage them to use Incognito Mode in Chrome, especially when signing in to Google Apps. In an Incognito Window, users simply need to close the window to sign out of the account. A side benefit--cool secret agent in the top right corner. [File > New Incognito Window]

According to the Center for Disease Control , rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006 and an average of 5.5% per year from 2003 to 2007. How can we as educators combat shrinking attention spans? Easy. We train them. Google Engineer turned Mindfulness expert, Chade-Meng Tan outlines an extremely persuasive argument that attention is trainable in his book Search Inside Yourself, The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) . The simple act of sitting quietly for a brief period of time and paying attention to attention dramatically increases focus. Based on his research, I have my students spend 60 seconds at the beginning of each period in silence. I ask them to simply pay attention to their breath, and if a thought comes up in their head, identify the thought, say hello to it, and let it go by focusing back on the breath. I assign one student a bell and she rings it to begin the practice and then rings it again after on...

I'm looking for feedback. I'm applying for the Next Edu Guru on Youtube . Take a look some of my videos here . If you like what you see click the like button. If you don't like it click the dislike button. If you want to see more click the subscribe button.

If you use Google Calendars and use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you may want to access these calendars in your device's Calendar app. Here are Google's instructions , but if you want to see the process yourself, you can watch this video.

I want to be able to see what it’s like not to hear or say anything and still be able to communicate with everyone. I would also like to share what that’s like with my friends and classmates. I want to know what the challenges are and how people who are deaf take on those challenges on a daily basis. Thus begins Reinel's 20% project proposal. Her plan is to spend a week wearing a headset that emits white noise so that she will be effectively deaf. She plans to create a short film that will document the experience and help spread awareness of the hearing impaired community. You can follow her progress at her 20% Project Blog at  http://makinigatmaintindihan.blogspot.com/ . Please leave an encouraging comment! What is makinigatmaintindihan you ask? So did I. Then she showed this supposed Google Certified Teacher the Google Translate page. Here's a taste of how her week will look ... and sound. 

I have at least seven Google accounts. I have a personal account, a school account, an old school account, an official Brookhouser trainer account, an account I use for the school's YouTube channel, an account I use when I volunteer for the SPCA for Monterey County, and a few that were created for me when I was training others in their own domains. I only use three of them on a daily basis: personal, school, and school's YouTube channel, but I do use them daily. My workflow had been Chrome for personal, Firefox for school, and Safari for YouTube. That way I could stay signed in without logging in and logging out over and over again. Yes, Google does allow multiple sign-ins in a single browser, but I don't recommend it. Then on the Google Educast, Sean Williams, Chris Betcher, and Diane Main taught me to create "multiple instances" in Chrome. See the clip here . Since I followed their instructions, the entire way I interact with Google has changed and becom...

I wish I could take credit for coming up with the idea behind The 20% Project. In truth I got the idea from reading Daniel Pink's Drive , and he got the idea from reading the latest psychological studies about motivation and visiting innovative businesses like Google. Well at least it came from the greatest minds collaborating on how to transform education in the 21st century, right? Nope. Actually The 20% Project was her idea. No, that's not a hoodie. This is Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator who founded a movement in education that suggests that students should learn by following their interests and interacting with their physical world. The teacher is there to provide order and structure. From The American Montessori Society : The teacher, child, and environment create a learning triangle. The classroom is prepared by the teacher to encourage independence, freedom within limits, and a sense of order. The child, through individual choice, makes us...

During The Bad Idea Factory one of my students enthusiastically announced that he wanted to build a foundry. Cue visions of 19th Century Manchester with large crucibles pouring extremely orange glowing metal into a form shooting sparks everywhere. You know, this. "That sounds dangerous ... and fun," I replied. "Do you know anything about molding metal?" "No." "Do you know anyone who knows anything about molding metal?" "No." "OK, well if you're going to take this on, we're going to need to find someone who can help." "Can't we just figure it out from the internet?" "Maybe, but I think we're going to need some guidance." From my experience last year, I decided that a mentorship element would definitely help my students find more success in their 20% projects, so I'm now making it a requirement. The mentor's role wouldn't be a huge time commitment. They would per...

"Today your job is to come up with good ideas. And bad ideas. Really bad ideas." This is how I framed the first 20% Project day in my English class where we create what I'm calling The Bad Idea Factory. The idea came from a workshop I attended while in Bahrain a couple years ago led by Ewan McIntosh. From his blog : When you ask a room of professionals to come up with their “best” solutions to a problem you often tend to get great ideas, but not always the best ones. They can be contrived and almost always involve some self-censorship from the team: people don’t offer anything up unless they feel, explicitly or subconsciously, that it will get buy-in from the rest of the team or committee.  Ask people for their “worst” solutions to a problem and people tend not to hold back at all – laughs are had and the terrible ideas flow. And while the initial suggestions might feel stupid, pointless or ridiculous to the originating team members, these awful ideas can take ...

Shared folders (which used to be called collections) in Google Drive (which used to be called Docs) rocks. I preferred the term collections  over folders  because the metaphor worked better. In the real world you cannot put one document into two separate folders, but in Drive you can. I'll get over it. I'm more concerned with how destructive collaborators could be in shared folders. Last year I had all of my students submit their work to me in a shared folder. One folder for each assignment. It was great. They had the responsibility of "turning it in," and I could see all of the docs in one place. This is SO much better than having students email you their work, and it keeps everything organized. When I tell people I do this, their first comment is, "don't all students have access to other student work?" My answer is, "Yes, and that's great." Their concern is (A) they might steal other student writing and (B) they might vandalize other...

Had a great conversation with Chris , Fred , and Google's Tasha Bergson-Michelson  about A Google a day , and the Power Searching with Google class. I also talked about my 20% project and this video of my students presenting their work.

Watch this screencast that shows you how to create forms that will help you grade essays faster while removing some of the mystery students feel about subjective assessments. Also see how I use the iPad while I grade. Here is a link to the Google Docs Template . You must be signed in with your Google account to view this.