District Hopes To Become More Efficient & Responsive
By Ryan Engstrom
The Superior School District is moving to full adoption of Google Apps for Education
Recently, the School District of Superior made the decision to move to Google Apps for Education. The following explains some of the key factors in this decision, highlighting the features of the solution that will benefit district administration, teachers, and students.
Email: Before moving to Google, staff email was housed internally on our servers. While this solution worked well, we were quickly outgrowing our capacity needs. Increasing capacity proved to be costly, which is why we looked at Google. Google provides unlimited storage for educational institutions at no charge. Thus far, this has been a welcome change with staff, as they are no longer required to maintain their email account to fit within our quota requirements. With the implementation of our one to one program over the last couple years, it was becoming clearly evident that students needed access to some sort of email solution as well. Google allows us to provide email for students as well, within a very controlled environment. Through the Google administration tools, we currently enforce restrictions for student communication. Overall, this is opening up another method for students and staff to communicate and collaborate.
Storage: Another added benefit to moving to Google is Google Drive. As with the email, Google Drive offers unlimited storage for staff and students to create and share content. To control capacity and growth, district users are held to quotas on our internal storage, which can often be frustrating. Having unlimited capacity for users will eliminate these frustrations.
Classroom: A relatively new feature of the Google Apps for Education Suite is Google Classroom. Several teachers are already beginning to explore the capabilities of this new offering. It has been designed to help keep classes organized, improve student communication, and save time.
In closing, the move to Google has had very positive response at this point. The ability to use these tools from anywhere an internet connection is available will lead to a lot of positive results over time.
