[CASL-L] Google Apps

[Kristie McGarry]

Good Morning All - Here is a composite all of the responses to query about Google Apps / Google School earlier this week.

Have a great weekend everyone!
Kristie

For the most part it's been positive. The kids have email available to them. There are still some MS Word programs on lab computers, so some staff have been a little resistant to changing. Google docs is not as full function as Publisher, or even Word, but I find it fine for a classroom environment. The good news is Google is great at converting documents. So if a student creates a word doc on a higher level than ours, there is no more compatibility issue. They just upload and convert.  One of the other benefits is that Google saves automatically, so fewer lost documents.  Collaboration is also a huge plus. I have monitored my kids work from workshops!  They can also work together easily in groups on documents, presentations or spreadsheets.  On the negative side - occasionally Google will time out, or hang up, but not very often.  Overall, I find it a great educational tool.
We love it!
We brought on the two middle schools first and then the high school.
Teachers and students make use of it daily!
I can tell you that we currently retain control over which sites are blocked in school.  Youtube is one of them. The tech department has also segregated the different schools in our district.  High schoolers can use email outside the district but middle and elementary students cannot. Likewise, high school students can use Google sites to create collaborative web sites, while only teachers can do this at the lower grades.
We have been using Google.docs for several years. Our IT department set us up  under the <school> domain and I am the administrator. That means I create all the accounts. All of our students acquire an e-mail account through the school when they enter Middle School. Just for ease, I use the student's mailing address as their password.  I introduce the program in Oct. for 6th grade. The science department has them do a group project using PowerPoint. I find they continue to use it, even if it isn't an assigned method for their final product because many of our student have Macs and they are able to work on a document back and forth between school and home and not have the incompatibility issue. The teachers like it because they have accounts too and are able to check their students' progress.

I guess one drawback is one person has to be the administrator, which in a school of 1,200 students can be time consuming. I create about 400 + accunt each fall and delete the 8th grade accounts in the summer before they go to high school. They don't keep the school domain account because 1) Google limits the number of accounts I can have and 2) by that time they all have their own personal g-mail accounts which includes docs.
Another factor is you really need to use Google Chrome, FireFox or Safari as your browser - Internet Explorer is too unstable and crashes.
It does have some glitches, I don't think any program is perfect, yet it's a great way to get the students and teacher to start  using "cloud" technology.
We are a Google Apps school. I would highly recommend it. The IT person set it up for our district and I worked with classes to get student accounts activated. There are a lot of integrated uses for their google accounts too. Today students uploaded their Works Cited pages from Noodletools, right into their Google Docs accounts. The students will all have access to their own Youtube account which is very useful when working on video projects. I can't imagine not having it at this point. Having a uniform email for everyone is really helpful for collaborating and communication
We introduced Gmail to our 6th, 7th, 8th grade students four years ago. Initially, there was some concern about cyberbullying and using emails for non school purposes. Happily, there have been very few problems and it's made collaboration very easy. Now, whenever students do group projects, we use Google Drive and have students share documents and presentations among themselves and also with us, so we can easily monitor their progress. It also eliminates their excuse when they are absent as they can work from home. We use Easy Bib as a citation maker, and students can very easily save a fully formatted bibliography to their document or presentation.
     It's been a very good fit for our school.
We went google this year. Teachers were rolled out and some students. Life has gotten a lot easier.
We are not a Google App school but have intermittent access issues with Google Drive.  At times, we receive the message "Internet Explorer cannot display the web page"--not the typical blocking message through VuSafe.  I'm curious if other districts have this message, and will contact me!  Thank you! Sara Kaluzynski (kaluzynskis at stratfordk12.org<mailto:kaluzynskis at stratfordk12.org>)

Kristie McGarry
Library Media Specialist
Derby High School
8 Nutmeg Avenue
Derby, CT  06418
203-446-2612 ; 203-736-5032
www.derbyps.org

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