Monday 9 December 2013

Deploying G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Education)

Deploying Google Apps Following the Google Teacher Academy (GTA), I was very excited to get going in deploying Google Apps for Education for our school (see post coming soon).    Prior to GTA, I had already successfully applied to Google for Google Apps for Education (GAFE) for our school, and I had set up a domain via registering with Go Daddy.
Getting Going As a user of Google Apps for a number of years, including using it collaboratively whilst at University to work with other students on documents, I was confident I could at least get started by myself.   However, after stumbling around a little bit, I used a couple of excellent resources to point me in the right direction.  Firstly, the Google in Education training center (http://edutraining.googleapps.com/) contains many hours worth of training materials.  I began working through but quickly wanted to jump ahead or find a solution that wasn't described immediately.   Another excellent source was the amazing work of Google Certified Trainer Ian Addison, and thanks got to Ian for his excellent work describing deploying Google Apps:  http://ianaddison.net/tag/google-apps/

Sites
 I followed Ian's advice in created a home page using Google Sites.  Users have to login before accessing the page, meaning direct subsequent access to mail, calendar, drive and sites.   I found using sites initially frustrating, with many options such as themes, page layout, manage site, edit page layout etc. all a bit confusing to begin.   A few hours later, though, I find myself moving around sites much more rapidly. With my new skills, I then created sites for our staffroom, a site for  governors, and a site for our school improvement plan; all of these pages are currently hosted on our Moodle VLE, which we will be moving away from.   I could replicate all of the features from Moodle with the pages, except for discussion forums and automatic email when new posts are made - these two points are on my action plan!


Following the creation of these sites, I then created a site for each of the year groups in school;  I created one template and then copied it many times.  The year groups sites are public, and I was impressed with how well GAFE manages permissions, with the staffroom and governor page locked down to specific groups.   I also mapped websites to specific URLs for easy access for parents.   We currently use Weebly for our year group websites; whilst we really like using Weebly, prices will be going up, and we can achieve everything we need to do with Sites.

The Admin Console
 I added a link on our home page to the admin console, initially for easy access for myself; this will be the link used by appropriate staff in school to access the admin console.  I am so impressed with the Admin Console.   Adding users is so simple, including uploading from CSV.  Slightly trickier is setting up an organizational structure but, boy, is it worth it!  Our structure includes adults (full access), KS1 pupils (domain only email, no sites), KS2 pupils (domain only email, domain only sites), and E-safe KS2 pupils (public email and sites).   I will soon be creating some 'badges' for our pupils to award when they have demonstrated appropriate e-safety skills (thanks go the inspirational Carrie Anne Philbin  -http://www.geekgurldiaries.co.uk for the ideas).   Pupils will each have a Google site to use as an e-portfolio, including e-safety work; they will be able to add badges to their sites once achieved.

Groups (Admin Console)
Once I had got some users added, I could explore using groups to organise.  I set up groups for pupils, staff, governors, and what is great is users wil be able to email groups using the email assigned (for example: staff@myschool.org) - staff and governors will love this.

Calendars
Our school has used Google Calendar for a while now to share events on our school website (www.greathorwood.bucks.sch.uk), but we have used my personal gmail account for the calendar - far from ideal.  With GAFE, we now have resources created (via the 'Apps' link/calendar on the Admin Console) for our main school calendar, staff calendar and room booking resources.   This will be so much more straightforward once shared with staff than the current combination of Google Calendar and Exchange calendars shared in complex manners!  The only slight disappoint has been the complex route users need to go to access shared resources; once logged in to calendar, users have to click other calendars, browse interesting calendars, choose 'more', click on our school resources and then subscribed.  I've searched high and low but not found a simpler method that requires less clicks. Drive This is the app that I have explored least at present, and I'm really looking forward to getting going with staff and pupils.  At GTA UK, I was so impressed with how trainers (@wendygorton) used the collaborative features of Google Apps to take responses from all fifty delegates at once!   People were madly typing away at Chromebooks, Macs and (a few) Windows PCs; the responses all appeared simultaneously on the projected image.   I am hoping to try similar things with our pupils and their netbooks during lessons.  It is also a facility that I'm hoping to use with staff at our staff meetings.

Next steps
So much to do!   We have decided to seek parental permission for our pupils to use GAFE.  Once in place, we will then be migrating our staff and pupil email (I will show staff how to use forwarding from Exchange before we ultimately close the accounts).  Our Moodle VLE will then be decommissioned; it's been a very useful tool for us, but we need something more flexible for us all, and I can't wait for pupils to get going with their e-portfolios to showcase work across the curriculum, including the new computing curriculum.

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