We’re soon going to partnering with another local sixth form to provide a greater choice of courses for students. This means that students could be studying in different locations as well as at home each week. Although we could host their documents at one of the two schools and make them accessible over the Internet our local authority never seems to make this very easy. We also can’t afford to implement a complete Email solution to our current students and staff.
So here comes Google Apps Education Edition to help us!
Google Apps provides “free communication, collaboration and publishing tools” which we “customize with our school’s logo, colour scheme and content.” without us having to provide or maintain any hardware or software.
As our headteacher said “Wow – the Google Apps looks fantastic – there must be a catch somewhere!”
Two quick answers:
- Our main potential drawback will be the speed of our connection to the Internet in school.
- The catch for Google Apps is that we are helping Google attract and keep users.
However, when you take into account the enormous value of the applications for learning it does seem to me that there is a net benefit to schools for using the services.
Our main drawback will be the speed of our connection to the Internet. The more services we provide online the more the speed of our Internet connection in school is an issue. Speed at home will not be an issue for students.
The catch is that we are helping Google attract and keep users. Google’s much vaunted mission statement of “organise the world’s information” comes with a caveat of “don’t be evil” – one key question is how much we trust Google to maintain the security and privacy of their users.
Google benefits from dramatically increasing the number of users to their services. We can turn adverts off for the educational services – but in the longer term if Google gains users in their teens and early 20s and retain them they are able to have their adverts seen by more users. – This is the same reasons that banks work so hard to attract students’ accounts.
Advertisers also pay more for Google adverts because they are targeted by the content of the page. For example, if I wrote an Email about dog food the adverts would be tailored to promote brands of dog food.
It is evidently in Google’s best, longer term interests to maintain consumer confidence in their systems and as a result they do provide guarantees and rigorous policies to protect users.
At the moment Google appears to be honest and open and trustworthy in their use of services and user data, particularly when using services for schools and non-profit groups.
When you take into account the enormous value of their applications for learning it does seem to me that their is a net benefit to schools for using the services.
This discussion is true for the massive amount of free tools on the Internet which are supported by targeted advertising. Yahoo, Microsoft and many smaller companies use the same business model for part of their revenue.
Sorry for giving a bit of an essay style answer – and not a very good one at that – but this is what we are teaching our students about!
Here are the obligatory customer testimonials: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#edu
