Google Apps in Education

Google Apps Integration & Administration

Working at a start-up school means solving infrastructure and logistics problems you never thought you, as a teacher, would have to consider. As the technology teacher and integrator, I had to consider how best to support the bring-your-own-device policy we decided upon as a secondary school. Students had laptops and needed access to our learning management system. The biggest gateway to all of this is e-mail. I purchased a domain name and installed Google Apps for Education. I became the administrator of our Google Apps installation and created accounts and e-mails for our students so they could use e-mail but, more importantly, Google Drive (then known as Docs), for creating and sharing documents and files. Teachers were on a different e-mail system with a different domain, leading to a lot of confusion for students when sharing documents. Our brave secondary team decided to take the plunge with students and we rolled out Google Apps to the staff in addition to students. The goal is to eventually get our administration, admissions and primary team on Google Apps and make it a whole-school install. This is a fruit of my work that I get to see in action every day and it has been integral to the success of our 1:1 laptop program. 

Learning Portal

As our school has grown just in the last year and a half, our team and the students needed a centralized place to organize all of the links that had started to gather to the blog network, email, Google Drive, our learning management system, etc. I set about creating a “learning portal” to ease the frustration of some teachers and students that felt like they were swimming in URLs to various sites. I set up one central URL for the school to connect with all of our tech tools and developed a series of sites with Google Sites. It has been a success so far and we have even moved on to using it to store curriculum development documents and policies. 

Learning@ISB – Our school learning portal for students and staff.

Google Sites as Instructional Tool

While there are many great website creation platforms out there, the simple wiki-like style of Google Sites, part of the Google Apps suite of tools, has allowed me to create some content and webquest-style walkthroughs for students beyond our learning portal. As part of my CEP 891 coursework in the Spring of 2012, I was tasked with creating a literacy tool. After observing the natural language-style searching that students use in class and how easily overwhelmed they are by search results, I created a how-to site about effectively searching for information online. The intended audience for this site is secondary students between the ages of 11 and 16.

Searching: A brief how to… – Literacy tool aimed at teaching how to find and organize search engine results.