Google @ School

I had a great opportunity to attend the 'Google @ School' presentations yesterday at the 'Googleplex' in Mountain View, CA. (I'm pictured here with Cheryl Davis and Kathleen Ferenz, whom I presented the GoogleIT sessions this summer and will repeat them in Monterey this November!) There were presentations from many of the teams working on the 'free Google Tools' that have a variety of educational uses. The tools included, Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, YouTube (I found out that one of the YouTube project leads is a Capuchino HS grad), Talk, Calendar and Pages. The best part of the sessions were the testimonials from Northwestern and Arizona State Universities about their implementation of the Google @ School tools and the 'domain page' that allows information technology directors to customize the tools and the level of access students and teachers have to each individual tool.

There is no cost for educational institutions to implement the Google @ School tools and Google can assist you in purchasing a domain name (web site name) where your tools will be hosted for $10 a year. Personally, I piloted this system for the students in Capuchino High School's Global Communications Program to give them access to these tools 24/7/365. Capuchino's Google @ School Page

I this could be a great solution for many educational institutions because Google has assured all educational institutions of the following:
- No cost for Google Apps for Educational users.
- No maintenance for district IT departments.
- Gmail can be filtered and blocked by districts by adding their own filtering, blocking device
- No selling or providing of data to any third parties by Google for the duration of the program.
- Districts have complete control as to which tools students and teachers have access through a dashboard that allows certain functions to be 'turned off.'
- Students can access their data and documents from any Internet accessible computer.

This might not be the right fix now, but it could be something that could be beneficial for all schools. Only time will tell.

If you want to take a look or want more information about Google @ School, check it out here!