Who has activated Google Apps Edu for their establishment?

[daibarnes]

I thought it would be interesting to gauge who has activated and is
using Google Apps Edu in their place of work. I had ours activated for
1500 users about three weeks ago (June 2009). Unfortunately, my
services team are not so keen on handing email over to Google so we
will be using all other features except GMail (:O() Also, we run two
domains (forests) separating admin and academic. Once upon a time this
was considered good practice and we are part of that legacy. This
means Google Apps is only available to staff who request it because it
can only be activated under one domain. I opted for the pupils domain
and then got a fake email address created for myself and the other ICT
teacher.

The longer aim is to prove the value added of Google Apps by using it
with the pupils.

I wondered how others were planning the roll out and use of Google
Apps including staff and pupil training, integration with VLEs or
CMSs? Collaboration between different committees as well as pupils and
pupil-teacher?

Initially I will be using the Google Sites facility coupled with
Google Docs for the pupils to make their own sites and embed their
work into them via GDocs. I would be really interested to hear your
plans.

dai

[Simon Brown]

Hi Dai

I have set up our account for 2800 users. Today we are going to have
a look at the active directory api, and see what conflicts the gmail
account name (being the same as our domain) creates. I am a little
worried about this and think I may have to set up a new domain name
for google apps.
The plan for now is to simply have a look at apps and decide if it
offers a workable alternative to office, I know that the potential for
collaboration is exponentially larger than orffice. I am also excited
that with 95% of our students having internet access at home this
could overcome many compatitibilty and sharing issues.

Will keep you posted.

Si

[dgilmour]

I am in the process of deploying Google Apps Edu in East Lothian
Education, where there are 6 secondary schools and associated
primaries and nurseries.

Around 2004/2005, we set out to improve collaboration between staff in
different establishments and create a sense of a professional learning
community instead of a collection of individual schools, all re-
inventing wheels. A key to that has been an East Lothian-wide shared
blog system, at edubuzz.org, which provides blogs to learners
including staff, students and parents, across East Lothian. It
enables, for example, simple visibility through "latest posts" lists
of what's going on within the community. Individuals have been able to
contribute to shared blogs regardless of their base location.

Like you, we saw Google Apps Edu as having strong potential to support
this community, as well as support individual staff and classes. We
also recognised a risk that if we were to deploy it using individual
school domains we might reinforce the barriers to collaboration
between schools which we were successfully reducing.

For that reason we have deployed Google Apps Edu on the same single
domain (e.g. http:/docs.edubuzz.org) for East Lothian Education. That
has proved successful a successful model with users to date, and over
the summer I plan to create accounts for remaining staff and students
(secondary and mid & upper primary).

Issues we have encountered:
- IT security have asked us to stop matching usernames with existing
network logins (a school preference), meaning we will need to migrate
some existing users to new non-matching usernames.
- Education staff working in locations served by the corporate network
encounter web filtering difficulties, as much of Google Apps is
currently blocked.

Re your questions:
- We have no immediate plans to integrate Google Apps Edu with a VLE
or MIS system.
- Experience has shown that training demand is almost zero. We
typically hold short after-school sessions to show some examples of
what's possible, and we find that once people have logins there are
hardly ever any requests for ongoing support. Students, in particular,
take to it like ducks to water, and probably support some staff. This
has made it feasible for us to deploy it authority-wide with minimal
support staffing.
- We have used it successfully for staff collaboration. In particular,
it was used to support the recent HMIE inspection of the education
service of the local authority, which was HMI's pilot for a new self-
evaluation approach. Our narrative self evaluation report was
developed in Docs, and hyperlinked to supporting evidence, documents
and spreadsheets created by school and central staff, also in Google
Docs. HMI were given read access and could see it as it developed.
This real-time approach proved much more effective than the usual
batch sending of piles of paper, and probably also saved many trees!

Hope this helps,

David

[svanstraten]

Hi

After your recommendation we've looked at it for Berkhamsted School
and hope to deploy it next term.

However, we will probably not use GMail for whole school use.

Regards,

Sacha

[Justin]

I'm in a small rural primary school, and have activated google apps.

I'm keen to give gmail to staff but not to children. I've done this
by using the postini service and some regular expression filters on
the To: line for different groups of users.

Will let you know how it develops next year.

Justin

[dneedlestone]

Sacha,
We're using it and up the road from you in Rickmansworth - stay in
touch, would be useful to compare notes.

Dai,
We have an account for every student and teacher - only a few year
groups actually know of their accounts and have used it but it's open
to any staff to use with their classes. Staff use a separate e-mail
system though all have a gmail account as well and a couple have
chosen to forward their e-mailto it as it's a better system and has
much much more storage.

Students do take to it very quickly and the collaborative aspect is
amazing when working on ICT projects. I hope that staff will start
using it and that maybe the students will lead them to do so - right
now it's just been the ICT department trialling it.

Not done any integration yet but may do eventually - we use the same
user ids as we do for network and forVLE but is upto strudents to set
passwords.