Google Apps for Teams - your students will love it!

[Chris Ryall]

If your system admins haven't been converted to the idea of using Google Apps for your email and to provide customised start pages, share calendars, collaborate on docs, publish web pages etc. then you might like this:

http://www.google.com/apps/edu/index.html

It allows your students to share documents, calendars, talk and a start page - all they need to do is register with the same email domain, eg [e-mail] and [e-mail] will be connected by virtue of the connected email address.

Very easy, and a good way to taste what http://google.com/a/edu/ has to offer - for free, and without adverts.

We've been using Google apps for our 900 students & staff for two months now.. and it is sweeeet. Eg. http://start.gcus.net makes a great customisable home page for students, some even set it as their homepage on their home PCs. Email is amazing, fully featured and again advert free - making it better than the regular GMail!

And welcome to the new members on ICTnet - whose been talking about us :)

Ps. - why won't Ning auto create my hyperlinks? - Facebook and Google make a great job of doing it!

[Mike Cameron]

Hi Chris,

And also great for teachers who want to collborate as well. One slight problem is that sites like Ning and GoogleDocs are blocked in some schools:

Site Accessible
My Space 7.70%
Bebo 10.10%
Flickr 27.80%
YouTube 15.90%
Facebook 8.00%
Ning 25.00%
Google Docs 57.70%
Blogger 39.50%

So Ning is only accessible in 25% of schools in the survey (over 100 schools). Generally this is an issue for web 2.0 apps as there appear a lot of IT Techs who say no as a matter of course to any request. Whilst a lot of the blocking is at country or RBC level, a substantial proportion is done by the schools themselves.

Mike

[Chris Ryall]

We've always found Suffolk & E2BN very responsive to suggestions we've made regarding filtering.

The key solution for us has been to takes some responsibility for the filtering ourselves - every school should be up to running & configuring their own caching and filtering system.

Letting the students and staff take responsibility for their learning - and keeping them engaged has helped to reduce the amount of misuse.

The more collaborative, accessible, fun & innovative tools we use with the students the less likely they are to risk our wrath by misusing the Internet! - if they could be working collaboratively on Ning, Google, Voki, Moodle, Elgg etc. the less likely they are to be found dodging work in Bebo. - keep them engaged!

Why on earth would anyone block Blogger in it's entirety! - Out of interest, what was the source of the figures you quote?

[Mike Cameron]

Chris,

Source was a survey I have been running for schools and is aggregated from just over a hundred replies (which is not bad considering the total number of schools).

E2BN have become more responsive over the years (having spent a good part of 10 years in Bedfordshire not always getting changes it is good to see that they are moving in the right direction) but many RBC's and LA's are less helpful.

What I think is needed is to generate the educational and pedagogical argument further so that the very idea of blocking, say, the whole of Blogger, starts to become unthinkable.

As an aside, I have an ICT Update that will be sent to all schools in the Summer term. I am always on the lookout for articles for it and it would be a good forum for the ideas around the use of GoogleDocs in education, if you care to take the time to write up 500 or so words on the subject?

[Chris Ryall]

I've probably got over 500 words lying around somewhere,
http://ryall.info/google-apps/
http://learn.gcus.net/course/view.php?id=384
plus the post above.

I'll get some students to work on it collaboratively when we get back after half term, they could even use... :)

[Chris Ryall]

... as long as they don't post the article on their Blogger powered blogs!

(Incidentally some use the blogs in Moodle, Ning or Elgg - but the majority of our keen bloggers are installing Wordpress on their own shared web space - very capable!)

[Mike Cameron]

Cheers Chris.


Just noticed that I've started to use Ning comments like IM (well, I think I have, but never having used IM I can't really be sure!).