NCCE 2010 Session 3 - Google Apps

Google Apps: Peninsula School District's First Steps & Successes

The third session today is regarding the utilization of Google Apps and how to keep 2000 aging computers in play in the facility. Peninsula SD has moved the entire student population (K-12) to google apps, this gives them the ability to substantially increase the life of their IT resources at a substantial savings.

The steps to success in achieving this were/are

• clear purpose and shared vision
• review policy
• look @ examples of best practices
• encourage and support pilot practice
• no staff development (did you need training for amazon or ebay? they rationalized that as a web app very similar to many other apps already in widespread adoption that a widespread training was unnecessary.)
• expect change - development time in the "cloud" is much quicker than in traditional software markets, rather than working with software released in 2003 (and developed earlier) the software at our fingertips is always updated and contemporary.
• Acceptable network use policy updated to reflect web 2.0 changes, etc. (use of student devices) needed to reach a 1:1 technology to student ratio. (ASSERTIVE statement about acceptable use!)

In order to succeed the strategy should include:

• 100% (preferably wireless) coverage
• allow personal devices to freely connect
• support web2.0 in ALL classrooms

Some more technical and geeky stuff here:

1. Implement the infrastructure
2. DNS Setup
3. initial acct generation (choose good domain name same as email)
4. sync w/ ad
5. single sign in validation (http://www.jasig.org/)
6. usage monitoring (google analytics) - postini
7. custom setup (Google API's)
8. don't let email kill the conversation with tech!!! turn off email! too often Google Apps is associated with email and killed instantly, disable the email feature if it's an issue.

By setting up google apps we put the tools at the fingertips of the user, no more compatibility issues. Google docs gives users 1gb of space for free, that's 2-3X the amount we can offer internally. In order to share the docs we can collaborate amongst the users, publish a google doc as a web page, published presentations create code to embed into other tools (blogger,etc). Additionally it's a collaborative presentation work, meaning that not just one person creates teh work while others view, it can offer public viewing with chat functions to facilitate collaboration. Perhaps the two neatest functions we can utilize are the form feature to submit and collect data sets (no more surveymonkey) and the fact that it's not device/platform specific - IT WORKS ANYWHERE THERE IS AN INTERNET CONNECTION!!!

One thing I was curious about was how to transition Sr's to the real world and they said that as a part of the Senior year they have the students create a professional persona and transfer all pertinent documents to the new profile and then give 6-12 months from graduation until they retire the accounts.