One School's Implementation of Google Apps

Craig Ham, Westminster Schools of Augusta, Georgia

Before the internet became a household word, our school had been using a campus email system for Novell Networks called Pegasus. With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990s we began using an off campus provider to host our internet mail. Subsequently we were able to download our internet email with our Pegasus client, but we were unable to read our local email on campus unless we were at school. During the summer of 2008 several systems were considered to replace our limited email system. While cost was a major factor, training and maintenance were also heavily weighted.

Just prior to attending the 2008 GaETC our school had made a decision to seriously consider switching over to Gmail. While attending the conference I had the opportunity to attend a workshop (W18: Google Apps for Your Domain) given by Daniel Rivera of the First District ETC. I got additional information from Session 109:  The Google Classroom and Session 246: Using Google Apps for Education to Collaborate as a School System.   All of the sessions stressed that the purpose of Google Applications (Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, Email, etc) was collaboration. During the workshop we were able to create accounts, manage them through the dashboard, and experiment with the features offered by Google. We were trained in the basic features of Gmail: contacts, archiving, trash, spam filters and labels along with the numerous settings found in Gmail. Mr. Rivera pointed out that several schools in his district were making use of Google Docs with both teachers and students to collaborate. Google Applications offers three Editions:

1. Standard: Available to anyone with a domain (FREE)
2. Education: Only available to schools (FREE)
3. Premier: Available to anyone with a domain and $50/year/account

During the workshop we discovered that many of the features available "only" in the Premier edition are also included in the Education edition. One feature in particular that the two editions share is the ability to turn off advertisements.

Returning to school I made a presentation to the administration team and it was agreed that there was really no downside to implementing Google Apps. Since we retained our existing email addresses there was no need to contact anyone. I had assured our team that existing Pegasus email could be quickly and easily transferred to Gmail using IMAP (with all header and date information intact). Also existing contact lists could be copied to Gmail as well. Our faculty relied on pre-configured email lists for mass distribution on campus to groups such as: Everyone, Faculty, Upper School Teachers, Office, etc. These were easily created in Gmail as an Administrator and available in the contacts list for everyone.

Within a week I was able to setup our Education edition account online and with a few emails to Google’s support team and Mr. Rivera. I redirected our email servers to Google during the first day of Christmas break, so as to provide minimal disruptions to the teachers. Over the holidays many people were able to login and access the features of Google mail, calendar, start page and docs. We then held several one hour in-service training sessions the first day back in January. These sessions focused on Gmail features: labels, conversations, archiving and contacts. Subsequent training will be on using the calendar, docs and sites features of Google Apps.

We’ve now been using Google Apps for over a week and the transition has gone very smoothly. Everyone’s contact lists have been transferred and nearly all the existing Pegasus email has been moved to GMail using the IMAP configurations.  Eventually we plan to implement a Google calendar as a public calendar so parents can keep track of school wide events, athletic contests and fine arts offerings.  Already we are considering numerous ways to consolidate documents and make them available to the faculty.  In fact this eJournal submission is being prepared and peer reviewed using Google Docs.  Finally consideration is being given to creating a Google Apps account for exclusive use of our students in grades 6-12, giving them one fully supported email and collaborative office application.

The entire implementation process was largely transparent to our users. The features have been outstanding and everyone has been eager to experiment and learn. Other than hearing “This is all so wonderful” the only other comment I have heard since implementing Google Apps has been “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”

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