Google Apps for Education

These are exciting times in Seymour...we have made a definitive decision to leverage the powerful Google Apps for Education suite here in the Seymour Public Schools.  This has been something that I have envisioned for several years now and to see it materializing is pretty cool.  Getting started on the other hand, is a bit overwhelming.  There are many considerations that must be addressed before you just "turn it on" and it's important to make sure that those decisions are informed and not done in a rush.

So far we have registered our domain and verified ownership.  We also opted to create a sub-domain (students.seymourschools.org) so that we could have our students using Gmail while our staff stays on the legacy Exchange server which we have configured and in place.  It seems that Google is moving all of the archiving and security to their servers from the 3rd party applications such as Postini so we will be leveraging those services from the start.  This is something that is very new to us here in Seymour because we have never had e-mail accounts for our students.  This is going to be a welcome advancement for staff who have been struggling for years with setting up students accounts and sharing through Google.

The next steps now are to provision our users and setup the groups and policies.  This is something that must be considered carefully because you do not want to have to hit the reset button after you realize you made a mistake in organizational structure.  I will be conferring with New Canaan Public Schools' Tom Honohan quite a bit moving forward as he has been my go-to contact the past few weeks (and months really).

I will continue to update our progress through this blog and look forward to sharing our experience with everyone else.  If you are reading this and have gone through the process...please drop a comment with any advice.  Also, if you are a school district setting up your school right now, let's chat and compare notes.  Until the next installment...

Oh by the way...in addition to setting up GAFE we are also going to be piloting the Acer Chromebook in several different classrooms at the elementary, middle and high school level.  Like I said at the beginning of this post...these are exciting times here in Seymour!