Google Apps - Example websites and iGoogle Start Page Ideas?

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Permalink Reply by Mike on April 25, 2008 at 7:31pm

I chose not to have an iGoogle start page for my students to keep them from getting distracted. Some of the widgets I saw offered on the iGoogle pages were cool, but there were some inappropriate ones also, so I figured I'd steer clear. Currently I have the email turned off and only let kids share things within our domain, so some of the iGoogle page features weren't useful.

I just put the docs login link on the "students" section of our school's website. Here is the link.

Google docs has been a blessing. There's no need to load Office, it's great for kids to collaborate, and I can easily make comments or changes to their documents. It is great for whole class collaborative projects. My 7th graders recently made a digital booklet about muscles that started as a collaborative presentation on google docs. (They each made their own slide about a muscle on a single presentation to start). I'm also very excited about the forms that you can do with the spreadsheets. It's a great feature that they added somewhat recently.

On the down side, I did have to suspend a couple students' accounts after they started sending some inappropriate things back and forth when they weren't at school. When the students got their accounts suspended, everyone seemed to wise up about what they wrote and what they shared. I know I can't watch over everything they do, but I just try to send a strong message.

The benefits of it outweigh the negatives.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Whyte on April 25, 2008 at 11:15pm

We brought this idea up with our Superintendent the other day, her response was who owns the site and what happens if it goes down? I realize the benefits are tremendous however the potential loss of information is also daunting.

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Permalink Reply by Mike on April 26, 2008 at 8:43am

I would tell her that it's google. They seem to know what they are doing. There is also a new feature that lets you use it offline, so you can download all your files to a computer, work on them, and they'll sync with the online documents when you go back online.

I've been using it personally for about a year with no trouble. We've had it in our school for about 4 months with no problems.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Whyte on April 26, 2008 at 8:51am

However, it might also be a problem because legally our district owns any work done while under their employ. They cannot control or access what they cannot get at.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on April 26, 2008 at 5:00pm

That the exact reason I have my own website and pay to have it served.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Whyte on April 26, 2008 at 5:51pm

Yes but as an employee anything you create technically is there's. Ah, post it notes and 3M come to mind.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on April 26, 2008 at 5:59pm

My fav story dealing with intellectual property---I had written an online course called Exploring Leonardo D'Vinci and housed it on a personal subscription (won it at NECC) to Blackboard. The year after I used Bb the district bought it, and asked me if I wanted to move my course over to their Bb. I said sure I'd give them the curriculum, for $3000.00. They declined so I move the curriculum to my website and anybody can use it for free!

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 26, 2008 at 6:35pm

Thanks, Mike, Tom & Nancy! Nancy your website looks great. I've bookmarked it and will be spending more time exploring it. Mike, I liked the digital booklet (and found out about issuu.com in the process :)).

I have a sense now for the potential policy issues/questions that need to be answered before going with GAEE.

Assuming that it's a go, what would be some good gadgets for the school start page?

I realized after I posted this discussion that the Google Apps site mentioned a "Start Page" which I assumed meant iGoogle, but it's not. (Again) assuming that most Google gadgets would work nonetheless (although I'm not sure if I'll get the iGoogle tabs which I thought would be very useful for categorizing the Start Page stuff)....

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Permalink Reply by Tom Whyte on April 26, 2008 at 6:43pm

Are we talking about iGoogle Apps, or Google Page Creator Apps, or Google Sites Apps? Currently, exploring all of these options, however also looking at combining edublogs with wikispaces to help facilitate an ed tech project idea.

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 27, 2008 at 10:35am

Google Apps for Education, Tom, which gives unlimited email IDs with the school domain name, Google Sites (not available outside of Apps), and a "Start Page" with the other usual goodies (docs, gtalk, etc...).

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Permalink Reply by Mike on April 27, 2008 at 1:17pm

Right on Shuchi, the emails are also nice to have so you can sign students up for other services or add them as users on your blog. Even if they aren't activated, you can still use them to sign up for stuff. There are a lot of useful sites for students that require emails, so this keeps it simple.

The students also have access to calendars, google pages, and the other things you mentioned. You can turn these features on and off at your discretion with a single click in the dashboard.

If you want to see more, I've got a post about the ways I use it in class on my legend blog. It's got some student samples if you're trying to persuade your district to use it.

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Permalink Reply by Shuchi Grover on April 27, 2008 at 6:16pm

Thanks for that link to your blog post, Mike! I've added a comment to there as well :)

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