Category: Committees

I just received an invitation to join a ETS team pulled together by Allan Gyorke on Google Apps for Education:

Hi Everyone.

Google Apps for Education (http://www.google.com/a/edu) is an initiative that provides a suite of communication and collaboration services to educational organizations.  While many institutions have adopted it as a way to outsource their e-mail services, the suite can do so much more.  All of you have used Google Docs to collaborate with your students and colleagues, but no one at this university fully understands the potential for Google Apps to transform teaching and learning at Penn State.  This is where you come in.

Currently, we are in discussions with Google about licensing, policy, and technical issues.  While those discussions are taking place, John Harwood has asked me to form a team to investigate the pedagogical implications of the services within Google Apps for Education.  This would involve an examination and a write-up of each tool that would concisely describe what it does and how it could be used to enrich teaching and learning.  John would also like to see a plan for informing the university about this new service and getting faculty, staff, and students prepared for its launch.  If and when team has concerns with the suite, those issues should be brought to John’s attention so they can be addressed.  We have contacts at other large universities who have implemented this service, so they can serve as a resource in addition to what the team discovers on its own.

If we do sign an agreement with Google, we should be prepared to implement this service by the beginning of the fall semester.  John would like to have a draft of our research and the training/implementation plan by May 1, 2010 and would like to have monthly updates as the committee does its work.

Please let Jane Houlihan and me know if you are willing to accept this invitation.  Jane will try to schedule the first meeting of this group in the next few weeks and then meet once every two weeks until May.  Not everyone will be able to make every meeting, but that’s fine – I’d like to do most of the work asynchronously using the tools in Google Apps where they make sense.

     Thanks,
      -Allan-

Our first meeting is Fri 12 Feb and I’m really looking forward to it because it’ll be an opportunity to work with a new collection of educators from around the university.

One of my questions will be related to the comment from an SOS member that said that Google’s inability to guarantee which servers would service PSU effectively ruled them out as an option because of security concerns.

UPDATE Fri 12 Feb – Kickoff Meeting

• Walked into a conversation on how identities will integrate.
• Documentation will have to be addressed in the documentation
• GoogleVideo is an institutional framework, only 100 people will be able to upload videos across PSU
• Look into using Google Contacts to sync/store contacts instead of Apple Address Book
• there is a test domain that has single sign-on and is stable
• Roxanne Toto and Kent on Documents – single page front and back written for various groups with scenarios, links, etc.
• we aren’t creating training materials, just overview docs
• 4 weeks, 2 weeks check-in, f2f meeting to work through the ideas
• real-world scenarios
• we should also capture barriers to implementation
• how do we establish priority
• hotseat, Purdue, check it out… voting, etc.
• Google Moderator – is it included?
• our tool in isolation vs. integrated with other apps – perhaps an eight question
• tech side testing – we’re writing papers on “nouns” but should also hit “verbs”
• our audience are the faculty
• check out bitly – tinyurl