I offered our first Google Apps training to faculty and staff members yesterday. I was really pleased with the questions from our workshop participants:
- How do students keep attention on their own writing while others are editing?
- When should we use Moodle, Google, or Word?
- What does it mean to be in the cloud?
- How can I invite others to edit a survey?
- When should I use the Outlook or Google calendar?
- How can I subscribe to the Catlin Gabel calendar in Google Apps?
- Could students use Docs for lab reports?
- How can I edit our daily bulletin from home?
- What security and privacy issues exist?
We are launching Google Apps primarily as a collaboration platform, not necessarily a replacement for our Office productivity suite and Moodle course management system. It will be the obvious choice when people want to work on a project together and a less obvious choice for online file storage, personal calendaring, and class websites. I have tried to keep the focus on learning and operations management rather than the tool itself, and so far the approach is working.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at
I like Google Apps and we’re working on our roll out now (not Gmail or calendars, but most of the rest), but their service delivery model is still a bit odd to me. If we were to make it a core component for students and teachers, I wonder if we wouldn’t need a third party caching system for the mail and files for “in case” situations. The recent articles about accounts being shut down because of username issues in Google+ is a little disturbing (if all the services and data disappear for the accounts).