…or at least Spartanburg 5.
For the past couple of weeks I seem to have been immersed in Google products. A couple of weeks ago I did a workshop for teachers in our district on Creating Virtual Tours in Google Earth. Part of the presentation involved the integration of Google Docs (documents, presentations, and forms) into Google Earth applications.
In preparation for the workshops I had set up our district with the Educational Edition of Google Apps. I got the domain name spart5.info, and was able to obtain 600 user accounts to be used by both teachers and students.
Things didn’t go smoothly at first. Google Maps, Picasa, and YouTube weren’t included in the available applications. Users on the spart5.info domain couldn’t even sign up for these. It was a problem, and one that almost prevented me from recommending this to the class.
The week of my presentation Google made a change. Any Google application would be available for all of the users. This made things much easier, and I was able to give my presentation using our new accounts.
So far things are going well with the new accounts. I’ve had teachers requesting accounts each week, and there seems to be quite a bit of interest. I hope we can keep this level of interest.
I’ll be writing more about Google Docs as we get into this project. While the products provided for education are fantastic, they aren’t completely perfect when compared some of the commercial products. Still, the opportunities are great, and I’m pleased that we can offer this to our teachers.