I’ll definitely try to keep you updated about Google Apps.

In other news, I’m applying for 9rules round 6 today! Maybe I’ll get in this time…

You’re very lucky to have such good support from administration! While our Superintendent is interested, he is still a little set in the “old” mindsets. Unfortunately, our tech director is even more so. Still, with some luck and support from the school board, we should be able to get Google Apps set up.

Just to clarify, I am not a teacher. I am actually a student and part-time tech assistant.

For collaboration, here are 3 quick sells. First using Presentation. Set up a session with other teachers on any topic. Like I listed above we did Differentiated Instruction. Assign each teacher or group a slide to work on. We asked each group to write up a scenario on a slide where they would have to differentiate instruction in some way. We discussed and then gave them ideas and suggestions on the slide right below it. Our principal set up another presentation like this, but it was on making changes to our Middle School schedule. He then asked teachers to give comments and suggestions on their assigned slides.

Another tool for is the Forms tool in Spreadsheets. When I show teachers this tool, they right away think of number different ways to use it. We have to give goals for the next year to our principal in May. In years past, we’ve always written them up on notecards and handed them into him. This year he is setting up a spreadsheet and survey to fill out for this. He sends us the form, we fill it out, and Google spits it all into a categorized spreadsheet for him–too easy! Our 7th grade team also uses a spreadsheet as an “Academic Watch List” for several of our students. We all keep it up to date with grades from our respective classes. Now, we can see what everyone else puts in and how the students are doing. No more emails and waiting. When a parent from my homeroom calls to discuss grades, I can easily pull up the chart. I don’t have to say that I need to call them back when I get the information. The Academic Watch list has been another great selling point when we show teachers and administrators how we’re using it as a team.

On the Documents, you have to show how you can easly share your work with others and the comments. I had a Special Education teacher tell me that keeping track of his students’ graduation project research paper has been a nightmare. He always has to track them down, and ask them to show it to him. Sometimes they have it saved on our server sometimes not. I showed him how they could set it up in Docs, share it with him immediately, and then he could follow along and track their progress just by opening the document. His jaw hit the floor.

Finally, we had several teachers requesting hundreds of dollars worth of thumb drives so students could take their work back and forth from school to home. Google Docs eliminates that cost.

I told you that I could go on and on about Google Docs, so sorry that this got so long winded. As I said, I think I’m pretty luck to work for the people I do. My principal, Director of Technology and school Superintendent are very much behind us in using Google Docs. I hope there’s something here that helps you and your team. At least you’re exposing this tool to several of your students.

Who did you have to convince before making the initial domain setting/setup?

Presently, I have been testing the service with a couple of other students, using the team edition. So far, it’s been great. Hopefully, once we get administrative support, we can switch to the education edition.

We started slowly with Google Docs by myself and another teacher going back and forth testing the school account. Both of us had our own separte Google docs account, but we wanted to see how tight the security settings would be on sharing outside of our domain. Basically, you can set the settings to no sharing outside of the domain to full sharing with no restrictions. I then uploaded all 7th graders and started using it a class at a time. It took off like wildfire. The kids love it. We (7th grade team) loved it. The ease of collaboration on projects has never been easier. Everything we do now we use Google Docs. We currently only use Google Docs, but we have Sites and Calendar also opened up. We will use them next year definitely.

Another plus to all of this has been feedback from our colleagues. We started talking about Google Docs and they wanted to know more about. We did some trainings, and they were the best trainings we’ve ever done. Everyone could see the potential of using Google Docs–from eliminating formatting issues to tools for collaboration. We got all of our Middle School and High School teachers uploaded and did two trainings with them. They couldn’t wait for us to get their students uploaded. We sent an email to Google for more accounts and got 1500 extra immediately. Now we have all students 6-12 uploaded. I know all of the students in grades 6 and 7 have used Google Docs and many HS students have as well.

I could go on and on about this. I’ve definitely swallowed the punch when it comes to Google Apps. It’s been one of the best tools I’ve used in teaching. If you have any specific questions, shoot an email. Good luck.

We tried to use all Google applications, so the slides are using Google Docs Presentation and we posted our links in Google Notebook and published it to the web and we used Blogger for our blog.

I hope that you are successful with your project, and I’m keen to hear how things work out. Cheers!