Set Your School Up With Google Apps for EDU
Launch your school into the 21st century! Google Apps for Education is a powerful communication, collaboration, and productivity platform that provides free GMail, Calendars, Docs, and access to a marketplace of expanding 3rd party educational applications tied to user accounts at your school’s domain and hosted entirely in the cloud. New Visions schools using Google Apps have reported overwhelming value from their use of the platform, and we believe it is a game-changing “must-have” for 21st century schools. This challenge is designed to provide the average K-12 educator all the tools they need to get Google Apps up and running in a few hours.
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Overview
Launch your school into the 21st century! Google Apps for Education is a powerful communication, collaboration, and productivity platform that provides free GMail, Calendars, Docs, and access to a marketplace of expanding 3rd party educational applications tied to user accounts at your school’s domain and hosted entirely in the cloud. New Visions schools using Google Apps have reported overwhelming value from their use of the platform, and we believe it is a game-changing “must-have” for 21st century schools. This challenge is designed to provide the average K-12 educator all the tools they need to get Google Apps up and running in a few hours.
Preview Action Steps
At its base level, Google Apps provides a secure login infrastructure for your domain that allows you to create and control user access to a range of cloud-based applications and storage that can be accessed through any modern web browser. “Cloud-based” is often presented in contrast to “client-based” software and storage, insofar as cloud-based services draw computing power and storage from internet-connected server-farms, instead of from local hardware inside your school. This distinction is viewed as a paradigm shift by most luminaries in the industry, as it radically lowers costs and adoption barriers and creates ubiquitous access for consumers of technology services. Google Apps for Education essentially becomes your school’s portal into a quickly-expanding universe of cloud-based services.
What does this mean concretely? The base (free) services that Google maintains for an Apps for Education domain include Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Chat / Talk, Calendars, Video, and Contacts.
By default, Google Apps for EDU does not necessarily comply with all Federal and Local requirements for privacy, child protection, and public-sector and school record-keeping practices. This video provides an overview of the various legal concerns and suggest how you can tweak it to get closer to compliance without incurring huge costs, financial or pedagogical...
Before you can set up Google Apps for EDU, you will need administrative control of a domain name, or URL, for your school. Many school districts provide domain names for their schools, however these are often not particularly useful because they are managed far from the school and under overly restrictive IT policies. Even worse, they are often impossible to remember.
For example, what administrative genius came up with http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/05/M362/default.htm as a domain name?
Fortunately the crafty educators at that school decided to purchase http://www.columbiasecondary.org instead, allowing them to customize their online branding and build a suite of powerful online teaching tools.
Watch this short video about how to set up a domain for your school.
Once your school has a domain over which you have administrative control, you can proceed with signing up for a Google Apps for EDU account here.
In order to connect your Google Apps for EDU account with your domain, Google needs to verify that you actually own the domain! Google offers several methods for verifying account ownership. Get to the step in the setup wizard where you see this...
and watch this short video to learn about your options!
When you first set up a Google Apps account, you are given the "Regular" edition of the product. Google makes a more robust version of the product available to schools for free, so you will want to upgrade from "Regular" to EDU.
- The Google help article on this topic is to be found here.
- If you want to cut to the chase and just fill out the request form, go here.
- The upgrade process should take a few days, and will make some important features available to you in the admin control panel. You will know it has been upgraded when you see the words "education edition" next to the header branding in the cpanel. In the meantime, you can keep working on setting up your Apps domain.
When emails are sent across the internet, the servers along the way use the domain name to lookup where it is supposed to go and re-route it to the correct mail server based on information that is set in what's called an "MX" record in your DNS settings. Dont' be intimidated by this. You can do it!
By default, the various services at your domain will have long, difficult-to-remember URLs like: http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/youpd.org
You can do better!
Google Apps for EDU allows you to create handy URL shortcuts to the various services hosted at your domain.
One handy way to manage user privileges on your domain is to group them into sub-organizations. The full version of Google Apps for Education (see Step 6 if you are lost) includes this among the many features that make its' school use more manageable. Once you have organizational units, you will be able to control access to services on the basis of which suborganization a user belongs to. Very helpful!
Decide on a logic for generating usernames and think carefully about it!
Usernames provide online identity to their users, and a few tricks can help you create usernames that are easy for students, teachers, and parents to remember.
Watch this short video on generating usernames and download the attached spreadsheet as a starter document.
Provide other YouPD users a short screencast that gives a tip to other users on the setup, management, or integration of Google Apps for Education of your school.
Learn how to download and use Jing for screencasting.
Use Jing to create a short guided presentation of your solution and attach any files that another user would need in order to replicate!
Once you have completed all the previous steps and you are satisfied the hack you submitted in Step 11, request to have your work reviewed by our team!
See who's joined so far
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Browse submissions
Enjoy browsing through the challenge submissions. Recommend those you like!
- Problem of practice:
I didn't encounter any issues while setting up Google apps for my school. It is a very easy to follow the instructions.
- Solution:
Following instructions will help you. You won't run into any issues.
