Google Apps implementation

[Susan Smith]

I am planning to pilot Google Apps to our 5th grade students this fall. Does anyone have experience with an implementation?

If you are planning an implementation and want company I would like to collaborate with you during our pilots. At this point I am doing research and developing a proposal to be approved by our academic technology committee.

[Curt Lieneck]

Matt,

Am I the only one missing something? The idea of having school "stuff" sitting on servers I can't access and have no contractual leverage with-- not to mention the inevitable data mining and other privacy issues that go with remotely hosted services -- bothers me a lot.

I know you are a sharp cookie and think about what's good for kids in everything you do, but I'm having a lot of trouble with how many and how fast schools are flipping operations to Google thinking that they are somehow "free." I have yet to see anything free in technology.

Can you help me understand where the tradeoffs are in this equation?

[Susan Smith]

Curt,

I tend to agree with you about this. I am using google apps, specifically google docs on a very limited basis. It has been a successful experiment with 5th grade students. Others see the possibilities and talk about using google apps ro collaborate on team notes, and student narratives. That is when I bring up the points you mentioned.

When people talk about dropping Exchange to use gmail all I need to do is talk about document retention, backups and restores. That usually ends the conversation.

[Peter Evans]

Curt,

We discussed many of these issues before we implemented Google Apps throughout our MS and US earlier in the year. In the end the positive gains in accessibility and collaboration definitely outweighed any privacy issues.

The only personal info passed onto Google is a student's name, which Google probably already through a personal Gmail address. As for data mining, we just didn't see a huge issue with Google potentially scanning through English papers and History presentations. Previous to Google Apps, most students sent there work back and forth through personal email addresses so the possibility for data mining has always existed.

I agree that few things are truly "free" but in this case a chance for cost savings exists. We are still installing MS Office on our school machines but I definitely see this changing in the future as online tools continue to evolve.

[Curt Lieneck]

I get the eventual inevitability of "the cloud." Just curious to learn more about what astute practitioners are thinking as we all navigate these kinds of transitions along the way. Our affiliation with UC adds another layer of complexity.

Went to a local higher ed meeting and heard folks from Northwestern talk about their process in going all to gmail for students. Fascinating stuff.

I put this topic on our agenda for our April LMAIS meeting. Be eager to hear others' take on things.

[Curt Lieneck]

Is cost the only real issue for you on this, Peter?

[Peter Evans]

Cost is not much of an issue at this point because because we are still purchasing Office licenses.

I am trying to move to a more open model that allows our faculty/staff/students to access from anywhere and avoid the usual issues involved with software and file format differences. We allow our US students to bring their personal laptops to school so we have a large variety of hardware, OS and application software in our school and any one point in time.

A package like Google Apps and others like it helps us cover the largest possible mix of hardware and software. Now that Google is offering the ability to work offline, our students even have a chance to work without an internet connection.

[Matt Montagne]

Curt et al-

Fantastic discussion here. This is really what I love about a threaded discussion like this...a topic can be started and continue on indefinitely. I suppose when we reference this in a few years we'll have found that things will have changed even more!

Peter-thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this. My thinking is pretty much in line with what you've posted. Google Docs, from an ease of use point of view for our students in getting files between school and home, has been quite positive. We're also getting to the point where we'll be throwing up a public WiFi node so students will be able to bring in their personally owned computing devices to use on campus. We'll have a host of device types, operating systems, and software when this happens. Google Docs is a friendly way to support this type of scenario. I'd like to talk more with you Peter about FP's experience with this model...perhaps we can connect at the LMAIS meeting.

We've done a handful of projects this year where students within the school have collaborated on a script for a podcast project or have collaborated on a presentation using google presentations...it has been a really nice tool for fostering these kinds of work situations.

Also, we're moving toward having our students collaborate with/work with students in other parts of the country and world. Over the past few months I've collaborated with teachers and students all of the world really. Google Docs and wikis are the primary tools for collaborative writing in these projects. I just couldn't imagine trading about various iterations of client word processing ap files amongst us.

Look forward to seeing everyone at Latin next week. By the way, do you think we should have a sub group on this ning for the LMAIS tech group?

Cheers!

Matt

[Ivan Nieves]

Susan,

At the beginning of this year I took on an advisory position with our school student newspaper. Now historically, it had very little support in terms of technology or guidance in terms of workflow. I mean, 60 writers, 20 editors, no class time to work, . . . and we are collaborating with another school?
There was also a decided martyr complex with the students. A rite of passage was to spend 20 hours during one weekend slapping together a newspaper.
Really?
So I started a google docs deployment. Editors create a sample blank article. They share that with the writers. The writers create new documents. Then they share those articles with the assistant editors. They comment, edit, then share the files with the next set of editors. Finally those editors share the articles with the faculty advisors. Come layout time, the documents are downloaded as word files, imported into InDesign, and an entirely different kind of hilarity ensues.

Pros: No more searching for which was the last edit. Easy to tell at a glance how many articles are done by when. Sharing documents invites peer collaboration and self-management.

Cons: The other school we work with does not run Firefox, so a little scrambling had to happen on a cold weekend morning (now my students show up to that school with USB drives running Portable Firefox). Students might have gmail accounts with funny names, makes it harder to just share a document with them.

Now with the advent of google sites, I am rolling out a unified project website for the newspaper. The girls will be able to create wikis, share calendars, upload files, and maintain performance logs. I am trying to get them to transfer all their verbal understanding of the process of putting together a newspaper into a documented, transparent workflow with checks & balances. We are also using other web 2.0 resources for this paper (SmugMug, Box.net, Basecamp). More on this later.

[Matt Montagne]

To extend this discussion, where do you think we'll be in 2-3 years in terms of "cloud" computing? Better yet, where do you see your organization going?

We actually had a discussion not to long ago about giving faculty the option of the kind of computer that the school would supply them with (eg-Mac, PC, etc)...especially with the amount of web apps that our faculty use for administrative functions like gradebooks, the OS becomes less important.

[Bill Clark]

We are looking at alternatives to our current "system", which is a mix of pop3 clients and webmail. We do not have our own server, and do not want one.

I have looked at First Class, but there are concerns abt cost. I am now looking at Google Apps.

What would it cost to have 250 mailboxes using the educational edition ?

[ryan gallagher]

I have recently migrated our school over to the Google hosted email and apps. I have setup more email systems than I care to remember including Exchange, Communigate Pro, Zimbra, First Class and several others. I really believe that the Google solution is among the best out there.
I did have a frustrating issue with the hosted google mail. Some pernicious jerk logged in as a couple of teachers (who did not change their default accounts) and deleted all their mail. Then, emptied the trash. Google has a clear policy that states that they will not restore user deleted mail. They will only restore mail deleted from a technical glitch. Google was not much help- they made me sign a non indemnification contract before they would speak to me about the
problem. Then, they said they would not restore it. However, Google support did provide log files detailing which IP deleted the messages.

I had to re-import mail from prior to the cutover, but I lost about 1 weeks worth of mail for the 2 users. It was very frustrating and not having backups was no longer an option for me. I had to decide if we should all POP the gmail or go with another service for backups. There are a couple of good options for centralized backup of the Gmail hosted email- something like the barracuda mail archiver (~3000/year) or, Postini msg discovery service for ~ 2300.00/yrs for 2 year retention of every sent/received email for 200 accounts (+900. 1x activation).

I chose to go with Postini. The hosted Gmail application is no longer a free email service, but it has a lot of great collaboration features. Google has a way of making complex apps that everyone seems to understand without much training.

So, bottom line is that there is very little systems administration and maintenance, no hardware, and the hosted applications plus a fantastic backup tool costs us around 12.00/ user/yrs (w/ .edu disc.). Not free, but a good deal for a solid email, calendar, collaboration service.

Oh yeah, adding the xobni outlook plugin really helped win over the XP/outlook users who refused to use the web interface.

[Cindy Marston]

Is anyone concerned that the Google Apps Terms of Service say that you have to be of legal age to use the services? I don't know WHY they would say that - GMail says 13 yrs old, but it does. We are trying to get students to review and think about what communities they are joining, and think critically about the choices they are making, and it sort of stunned me that the age restriction was so high. Any thoughts?