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.

[Art Gelwicks]

The primary question I asked was, "what's the tangible rather than the perceived benefit of an internal system over an externally hosted one?"

[Patrick Phillips]

The IT person can see, access, manage, archive and retrieve data and email understanding all the uptime attributes of the system. Those are tangible benefits.

As to their weight in the decision process... that is where the perceived benefit come in... Thanks.

[Lynne Bayley]

Patrick, are you still with SRS or collaborating with them on this project?

Sincerely,

Ms Bayley

[Page Lennig]

Our faculty and staff are using google apps and I want to begin to add students. What's your recommendation - add them under the current domain or a separate one? i want to be sure students can share documents with faculty. (and we aren't currently using gmail but i don't want to count it out in the future).

[Matt Montagne]

Hey Page,

If you want students to be able to easily share documents with instructors, then I would definitely suggest adding them to the same network. Permissions can be set to allow document collaboration outside of the network, but that adds a layer of complication in my opinion. When I was at USM the network was setup with all teachers and students in the same google network/domain. We didn't have a whole lotta doc sharing going on, but it was a start.

Good luck!

Matt

[Sandi Margolis]

If you are still looking for someone to join in your exploration- I am sure I have at least one grade 5 class interested. LEt me know directly at [e-mail].
Thanks!

[Bridget Looney]

Hi Susan,

I know I'm a little late for your proposal, but in case you're looking for more ideas after the fact, I used Google Docs with my third graders to collaboratively write the class play. I used it two years in a row and had different experiences each time. With my first class, it was a little tricky signing up for accounts but otherwise it worked beautifully. I asked students to ask their parents if we could use family email addresses for the account confirmation process, and since the children were going to be working in groups of three, we only needed a few addresses. The problems were 1) some of the children spelled their email addresses wrong when they set up their accounts (I let them do it themselves) which was a hard problem to undo; and 2) other children, even though the account set up otherwise went smoothly, didn't know how to get to their family or personal email account to log in and open the confirmation email. So, the following year I set up the accounts myself. Live and learn! Although the writing went smoothly the first year, I think it may have been because my first class was much slower with the typing... because the following year we experienced some difficulty with several groups working on the same document at once. Google Docs automatically saves every few seconds or you can save manually. Sometimes when one group saved, another group's information--that had just been typed-- disappeared. I don't know if it's because my second group was more verbose and typing at a more consistent rate or if the autosave feature was added after my first group's success.

I've also used Google Groups to run online professional development with faculty at my current school, where I coordinate the curriculum. I've used Google Notebook for bulletin board discussions since it's so easy to use. Google Groups allows forums, and a forum will encourage more dialogue than a bulletin board, but I found my less tech-savvy teachers quickly dropped out or didn't get past the login process when I switched from Google Notebook to Google Groups. The login process to Google is a bit of a hurdle for students and adults, so if you can facilitate that part, it's half the battle. Otherwise, I've found all the Google applications I've used to be very easy to learn. My third graders, already experienced with word processing applications, needed no instruction past the log in. I made sure to structure the document they were working on (the script) with headings so each group knew where to start writing and where to end. We also devised some guidelines for document sharing in collaborative groups that worked well both years (I re-generated the guidelines with each group and it became a group contract).

Good luck using Google apps... I think they're very motivating and empowering for children and make things so convenient for adults!!

Bridget