GOOGLE APPS

At this point in time after 6 months of piloting Google Apps – I can not envision teaching without it. Honestly it is the best teacher infrastructure available – period. The cherry on top of this wonderful ice-cream is that it is FREE. Wow – the paradigm that Goggle is currently using is outstanding!

I have 174 accounts live - and used all the time... I will be adding more in the future.

When I first started piloting it had only:

• G-mail
• Calendar
• Documents (Word Processing)
• Spread Sheets

Since then they have added and improved each time:

• Presentation
• Sites

Oh Sites – how a wonderful tool. Having come from the corporate world where groupware infrastructure systems such as Microsoft SharePoint or Oracle’s Portal Server are main-stay it is great to see a tool with robust features such as “Sites” come into the mainstream of Google Apps. This is a quantum jump in value-added to the whole Google Apps suite.

What is it? It gives the users the ability to create a web-site – but not just any web-site, but an integrated site right “out-of-the-box” no fancy knowledge is needed – you just bring it up and design your pages, integrate a file repository, different types of pages – all at your finger tips – it is incredibly easy to use. But what good is that? Can’t “Google Pages” do that? Yes, but SITES makes this is SHAREABLE – and with the power of group work, it becomes an unmatched tool for STUDENTS and TEACHERS in my case.

Kudos, Google!

Here is one examples you can see - click on the figure below to navigate to this example:

Although this is not public, this is my design of the Physics Unit "Site" complete with all the standards, handouts, warm-ups, lectures, materials, vacabulary, etc... All I have to say is - it is pretty impressive. From start to end the design took less than one hour while I learned the features of the tool... honestly, its that easy!