Google Apps Question/road block

My district just purchased Gaggle Accounts (filtered email accounts) for our 7th graders in hopes of using it w/ Google Apps. To use Google Apps you need to create a GMail Account which Gaggle will filter. Well, that's all fine and dandy but I have been running into some problems.

As an admin user I can create a district login page http://partnerpage.google.com/mail.greendale.k12.wi.us, however once a student logs in, they have their own personalized login page that they can customize. This is what we want to lock down. There is an "add on" link in the bottom right side of a users desktop, and when they click this they get any number of "add ons" from calculators, to weather, to news feeds, to adult/pornographic items as well.

Being a district that is very strict in following CIPA compliance we need to prevent these things from coming in, the filter does not block it.

How do other districts that use Google Apps handle this?

Thanks and Happy New Year!!!

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Permalink Reply by Justin Geeslin on December 31, 2008 at 2:18pm

The ability to add widgets and customize the home page is one of the main functions of the Google start page. If you don't want the users of the domain to have the customization ability, then perhaps you should code an HTML page yourself with only the widgets you want and disable the Google start page from the domain.

That would be the best thing to do.

Coming from a district that uses Google Apps, We had great success with using our own webpage as a homepage without activating the Google start page. The start page is an application like mail and sites which can be turned on and off.

We already had problems with students adding things they ought not on the general Google start page (google.com/ig). We knew right away the start page in Google Apps would not be something our domain would use.

All the widgets added to the Start page originate from a webpage. They are just iframes. You can always block the domain from which certain widgets originate.

Hope that helps. - JG

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on January 1, 2009 at 8:11am

Thanks for your suggestion I'll look into doing something like that.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Dickie on January 1, 2009 at 7:44am

Goto:
http://groups.google.com/group/apps-edu-circle/browse_thread/thread...
You can turn off all gadgets except the Google Ones and then you can add specific one back in. As I understand it, however, if users already have specific gadgets on their startpages those gadgets will remain there.