Google apps more features coming

Google heads to grade school: New resources for K-12 teachers and students

6/30/2009 09:07:00 AM

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world.

This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Washington D.C. To help address schools' email security needs,Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We're also launching the Google Apps Education Community sitefor educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource centerwith more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We'll be adding more to these resources going forward.

If you're at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

online office apps

Considering the last post was about one of the issues that we have with students bring in files now, this post is about online office apps.

There was a posting on a listserve about what schools are using as there email solution and preferred online apps. this has made me start thinking about what we are offering our students and what has evolved since then.

Google apps - education (currently using) There has been a number of posts lately looking at google apps and what they are planing on doing to the documents/spreadsheet/presentation apps, it sounds like we may not recognise there future iterations. But is this a good thing or a bad thing.

Next is the Live@edu, microsofts answer to the online app

Though there is another player in the market, it does not provide email services but I have been starting to play around with what they have, acrobat.com, the word processor app is called buzzword.acrobat.com and it has some interesting collaboration features.

Google Apps desktop features

One of the things I have been working on for the last year has been Google Apps education edition. This is the student mail solution that we are using at school. In the last couple of weeks I have been using the Google Apps desktop features to carry on doing work and communicating with my year 13 programming class.

Google Apps desktop features

Allow users to install Microsoft Windows desktop access points to Google Docs, Calendar and Gmail that are pre-configured to work with accounts on your domain. These apps launch in a streamlined Google Chrome browser window.

This update also allows users to set Gmail as their default email program.

Each domain has a unique download URL to enable the pre-configured settings for your domain.

To get started with desktop features, visit the control panel Advanced settings page.

from google website - updated 5/22/2009

Next step will be looking at Active Directory /LDAP support, though this will require a huge amount of work tidying up user accounts within out Active Directory. In some cases this will also require the Student Management System to integrate into Active Directory as well so it is all managed from one spot.

Google apps in schools

We have been using Google Apps for education for a term now, and have been finding it rather good, our biggest problem is not training or support, but rather our Internet Connections. We are a school of over 1800+ students. 

We have three ADSL connections into the school, all three are locked at 50 Gig of data a month. We constantly hit this with all three accounts and are trying to figure out ways to reduce bandwidth. 

We are on the lookout each day and week for the top websites of the day. Most of these are google sites but it is interesting how many of them are proxy sites for the students to get around our filters. These are a constant problem with student addicted to bebo. But that is another matter. 

It is great to see so many collaborative works in progress. With the ability to share documents the social studies department has become a hive of activity as students work in groups. This has not been able to be handled to great in the past with Microsoft ability, or non ability to do collaborative documents. Also the use of the google apps sites program, to create websites/wikis on topics and have other groups post information on topics they have worked on or provide questions and answers to topics. We are looking at how we can use these in other departments within the school. 

Staff are looking at a 21st century learning environment that is different. 

The ICT committee at school are looking at how to create a combined solution that uses Google Apps for student support - applications on tap but also KnowledgeNET for courses, tracking and support. KnowledgeNET is our Learning Management System. 

Some of our draw backs have not been at school, but more at getting the infrastructure in place. getting our domain host company to create the MX and CNAME records, total of 3 weeks to get done. Getting Google to recognise the K-12 status of our school, took a week and a number of emails back and forth to explain to them how the New Zealand system works. 

Also the management of students, google do not provide a facility to place extra information rather than first name, last name, login name and password, you cannot create extra field like a ID number or year level. 

So it has meant that we do not remove students that have left until the end of the year, it also means that we have to individually find each student at the end of the year and delete the account. So for a roll of 1820+ we have 1950 accounts created on google apps.

eLearning and email, which comes first?

What do we class as eLearning tools, we look at how students interact with the teacher through various packages like moodle, knowledgeNEt, wikis, LMS, and CMS, is it the sharing of information from teacher to student through electronic means.

As you may have figured it out I have been in development of students email at school through the use of google apps. I believe that there is a place that needs to be started at. We have ll these wonderful tools at our disposal but we still need a way to get back to the one on one, or face to face interaction with the student and the teacher. Email is the start of this, if they are not comfortable using email to talk to the teacher then the rest of the tools are going to inhibit there learning as well. Through google tools is google docs, this has a spreadsheet, word processor, presentation application all built in, students can create work online and share it through the publish facility. Is this not what we are after through our other various methods of eLearning, for students to share their work, collaborate on a project. Start small and work up.

Yesterday I went to a presentation on collaborative tools and got shown how an interactive whiteboard could help with that. A large capital investment, google apps is free and all it costs is Internet traffic. The same type of collaboration can exist through other methods. Talked about in that presentation was how they need to be supported in schools, through PD, top down approach, encouragement, resources. I look at what I am doing, this has been a very bottom driven approach, the students have been after this for a while. 

Every year we have year 9 students have that been using email within their previous school and wonder why we don't have it. Teachers question why students don't have email s that is a tool that they have developed and used within their teaching practice at other schools. Has their been a fear about how much email can hurt a school, or is it the practices/policy that need to change. The fear of technology. 

Teachers have had email for the years that I have been there. Now students will get that and hopefully elearning will start to take off.

google apps in schools

just a few notes on developing the student email system through google apps, with the 1826 students added to the system, I have been thinking about how the helpdesk and abuse of the system will be handled. What policy will be needed to help with this. I know that we are getting our acceptable use agreement sorted, but we need something more manageable at this stage. What do the students do with abuse claims, harrassment. These are students here.