Google Apps Guidance Needed

I have a school account established for my teachers and students but I am stuck. I want to set up what the kids are using as their homepage. From the past several days I see that iGoogle is not the option any longer, but instead use a start page. But how do I go about limiting all the inappropriate widgets. (And why don't the girlie widgets go away when it is turned into a school resource?) Do I have to create a start page for each of the kids and lay it out for them? If that is the case, do I make the teachers' start pages too so that the students can have a link to their pages? I was wanting a homepage for the students with an RSS feed (maybe), Google Calendar, a to-do list or agenda planner, short cut to Google Docs and later to add the Google Chat feature. Is there anybody that has already gone through this process that might be interested in helping guide me? I would SOOO appreciate it!

Tags: Google, GoogleApps

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Permalink Reply by Andrea McBeth on August 13, 2009 at 5:33pm

How did you get the "Add stuff" to not show all of the gadgets?

Thanks

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Permalink Reply by svinks on August 3, 2009 at 3:13pm

@Melissa,

As from December 3rd 2008, the Start Page is no longer included for new organizations that sign up for Google Apps. Personally I have upgraded our Google Apps Standard edition (which was created before that Start Page cut off date) to the Education edition and requested the limited gadget feature. Now none of our Google Apps users can add inappropriate gadgets. Users are restricted to the gadgets that I as an administrator allow and provide (by URL). For now I have only allowed the Google Apps gadgets. If users don't delete the default gadgets such as notes, weather, news and some more that I don't remember, they will continue to have access to these gadgets.
About email, I still have to convince my administration to set up student accounts, but with Postini recently offering a free service to the education edition, which allows administrators to control message rules for user groups, it should not be much of a problem. Here the announcement with further info http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/07/todays-day-signups-ope...

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Permalink Reply by Anthony VonBank on August 6, 2009 at 1:35pm

Depends on the age groups, but I let the kids do iGoogle pages, but they need to show them to me at any time (I take addresses down if I need to) and just stay over their shoulder about it. Now, that's 12th graders. I think your idea will be fine, but it seems like a lot of work. How about Blogger? It has feeds, widgets, what have you, but the center of it is all you.

You can see mine at:

bpglobaltech.blogger.com

and also, I am blogging about instituting Google Applications in the classroom:

teachingwithgoogledocs.blogspot.com

Hope that helps....

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Permalink Reply by Mike on August 13, 2009 at 8:35pm

I just turned the Start Page feature off for our students. It was sort of nice, but I found it to be more of a distraction/time waster. I haven't tried regulating the gadgets yet, mostly because I haven't had time.