Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Taking a Look at some educational tools available combining use with gmail:

Exchange 2010 - When combined with a Microsoft Desktop, the eCAL, and the extreme discounts afforded to education, there simply was no better combination.

Zimbra - Close second, but to get something that competed with Exchange you had to go with Zimbra Pro (I think it was called Enterprise before VMware purchased it). But the education discounts were not very good to be perfectly honest and the collaboration part would have cost just as much as our end to end Microsoft platform.

Google - Tied with Microsoft Live@EDU. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. They are becoming the new Microsoft from 15 years ago which is dissappointing. I like their tools, but increasingly to get the full google experience you need all things google which essentially means Chrome. I feel like shortly they will start making things only work on ChromeOS or Android forcing people to move away from Microsoft and Apple. The two biggest issues we had though was the poor integration with Active Directory (and the moving "student data" into the cloud), and at the time we were doing the evaluation google had experienced several large scale public outages.

Microsoft Live@EDU - Essentially this reduced to hosted exchange. We might actually still move out students into this in some sort of co-hosted (staff in house, students in the cloud) model, but there was no significant cost savings. There still isn't much cost savings to move out students to the cloud because administration would still be the same, and only a tiny incremental portion of hardware would be saved.

One must as a rule in the Tech department to get Chrome out as as standard, or at least a dual standard. There are now active directory extensions so it can be managed almost as well as IE8/9, and with a competent tech group there are not many applications that must run in IE (some activeX sites still require it). There is little reason to not run two browsers *if* you can educate your end users. Right now we run Firefox and IE, but we are about to stop supporting Firefox and swap it with Chrome. Our education push happens later this fall.

As for using IE with gmail, We have not found any problems at all. Disabling compatibility view pretty much resolves any issues at all, and make sure your flash and java are current is all that should be required. I have found that some VLC plugins have recently been causing me grief with Chrome indirectly causing Flash to crash, but I don't quite understand why. I can repeat this with tools like uStream on demand,,, removing VLC resolves it.

Finally, people should  considered the actual Gmail tips? They have some pretty good stuff on there, not to mention the icons for the ninja make people smile every time. :)

https://mail.google.com/mail/help/tips.html


Something else:

Has anyone looked at Karoshi Linux, Moodle or Joomla recently?

Karoshi Linux (now the Linux Schools Project) http://www.linuxgfx.co.uk/demo.html has been around for quite a while, comes with a rather full & integrated suite of features, driven by LDAP, with a Samba PDC to support Windows clients, It sports Moodle, Joomla and standard e-mail. Moodle has all manner of integration modules written for it. Is this not groupware-ish enough for a stand-alone school, or even a small school district?

Now, I'm curious what features Exchange and Zimbra provide that add value to the process flow of an edu organization besides the functional equivalent of email & scheduling. Are the needs pretty basic, or is it the drive for customization that leads bigger schools to big packages with big support?

Also.... at what scale is this discussion? If we're talking an entire school district, then Microsoft pretty much has the school district market sewn up with their discounting & the typical IT budgets of a municipal school district.

For smaller- to-mid-sized individual, independent schools, it used to not be cost effecting to become a Microsoft shop (w/ the lack of per-seat discounts afforded the district-scale organizations).  MS changed their site & district pricing to accommodate smaller districts and/or independent schools.
There's so much that could and should be done, but the sad state of primary & secondary education IT is stuck in a short-sighted quagmire. The small schools can't afford the help to drive innovation, the bigger schools just throw money at the problem.

Cloud Computing in School with Google Docs.

In short, pretty well. Google Docs has gotten faster and more robust and served brilliantly for any school's word processing needs. Wherever possible that the average K-12 student could live within their browser quite happily. With Google Docs (my online suite of choice because I’ve really bought into the Google ecosystem, but Zoho provides great tools as well), presentations, spreadsheets, and documents are utterly simple to produce. Despite the changes to Google’s marketing and sales of their Apps suite, their educational version of Google Apps for your domain remains free.

Blogger (and countless other tools) make it easy to produce documents online and share them as needed; Google Docs provides great sharing and collaboration tools as well.

Googlegroups also is good because it allows collaboration between teacher and student. An editions to the work would be highlighted and any desire to return to the original version of the document can be made by the author of the text.

This proves critical when a student has to prepare or edit a document that he has but is unsure of the LAN ecology in which he is using. To assure that his documents will not be virus infested, using an online document application wherein his file is uploaded, he is able to simultaneoulsy prepare the text, email it to share/collaborate with a etacher and simultaneoulsy in real time see the comments and remarks made by his teacher on the paper. A real help for the teacher who may be mobile.

Gdocs is also a remarkable tool as it allows the teacher to create an online exam in Google forms. After creating the exam he may simply email the form to his students and who will answer and send the form back to the teacher who may maximize the results.

Google Docs, thus is one of the applications that uses cloud computing and is very advantegous to the educational sector.

One of the things im thinking of giving consideration (although majority of my students come from class CD and E families) is having an internet access point for WIFI notebooks. Some of my students, especially from the short term courses that I offer, accidentally bring in their notebooks from work. It would assist them in having online portfolios for their multimedia, visual graphics and animation classes. So what does this mean for students and teachers using cheap netbooks? It means that even for schools who turn to netbooks as an inexpensive way to get more computers into students’ hands, some dedicated facilities for more sophisticated computing are important. It also means that a bit of flash storage, whether an SD card or USB drive, could allow some multimedia files to be handled client-side or moved between dedicated PCs and the netbooks.

In the end I am hoping that I would be able to create more opportunities that would have students from class B and C families coming in and bring notebooks as one of their tools in school.

Google is your friend

I know there are those among us who lack my love for all things Google. Sure, it shows our kids ads, keeps track of the searches coming out of our buildings, displays naughty thumbnails that only the best of content filters can block, most kids don’t look beyond the first three hits (two of which are usually sponsored), etc., etc.

Sure, that’s all true, but Google is a lot more than search. I don’t think I’m off base in saying that Google provides the largest, free set of Web 2.0 tools available to the general public, meaning that our users can access them at home or school and generally across platforms (including Linux in most cases). One of our after-school programs is taking digital pictures of various flora and fauna out in the woods, uploading the pictures into Picasa, capturing the location at which the pictures were taken using a GPS, and then “geotagging” that location in Google Earth.

This says nothing of Google Docs, Blogger, Knol, Sites, calendaring, SketchUp, and more. As much as kids like Facebook, it’s important to understand the real value of Web 2.0 technologies for social, academic, and professional collaboration. I maintain that kids will get more out of blogging about a field trip and being able to add thoughts and comments to their peers’ blogs than they would by writing an essay about the field trip.

Want to create an online photo album or website about the field trip? How about take a survey that dumps data in a Google spreadsheet about kids’ favorite parts of the field trip? Create an online presentation and then interact live with digital pen pals while they watch the presentation? All possible for free with Google.

Don’t kill Google because of some naughty 1″x1″ pictures. Let the teachers be responsible for enforcing school policy and turn on Safe Search. Instead, use Google for everything it offers beyond a pretty fine search engine.