Oregon K-12 Schools All in for Google Apps Education Edition
Google generated serious attention when it landed the city of Los Angeles as a paying customer for Google Apps for 34,000 municipal employees. Many people may not know the company also targets schools and universities with its collaboration suite in the cloud. Some 3,000 schools, from Arizona State University out west to east coast Ivy Leaguers Cornell and Brown use Google Apps for e-mail, word processing and other chores. Oregon became the first state in the nation to sign up for Google Apps for Education, which is free, in kindergarten though 12th grade classrooms across its 197 school districts. The Oregon Department of Education said April 28 it will provide all teachers, staff and students with Gmail for e-mail, Google Docs for word processing and presentations, Google Calendar, Google Sites for Website publishing, Google Talk for video conferencing and other apps. Google Apps Education Manager Jaime Casap wrote in a blog post: With Google Apps, students in Oregon can build Websites or e-mail teachers about a project. Their documents and e-mail will live online in the cloud -- so they'll be able to work from a classroom or a computer lab, at home or at the city (or county) library. And instead of just grading a paper at the end of the process, Oregonian teachers can help students with their docs in real time, coaching them along the way. The department noted that it expected to save $1.5 million per year in e-mail across the state thanks to this switch, with additional cost savings in reduced hardware and software upgrades. |
