GApps for Edu View Comments
I have very much enjoyed reading the tweets over the last few days from the first UK Google Teacher Academy (#GTAUK), which has caused me to stop and think again about the value of the Google Apps package…
There is much to like about GApps, and many excellent reasons why you might want to adopt it in your school, particularly for Gmail and the excellent real-time collaborative editing facilities.
I am also really excited about the platform agnostic (well apart from mobile devices) perspective which allows students to work from whatever device they like.
However the flip side to all these awesome features is that the actual office apps themselves are quite limited.
In the word processing part of GDocs for example you are limited to a very small subset of fonts, and an even more restricted set of font sizes. This is a pain for me as I use a custom font to represent the keys on the TI-Nspire calculator that we use in school, so this means I can’t do this in GDocs… I’m sure I can be the only one who needs occasional access to extra fonts…
One of the areas we have recently started using at school is a plagiarism checking service (turnitin.com) which allows us top check that students work is original and has reduced the amount of work that is just copy and pasted from websites like wikipedia! I’ve had a look and can’t see how this could integrate with GDocs… I guess we could get students to save their work as PDFs and submit thoughs, but I need to look more carefully into this…
Another area that causes me some concern is the limited ability to include multimedia in the PowerPoint-esq editor. Here you seem only to be able to insert YouTube videos (admittedly this is a great service) which makes it difficult to include your own video content or clips from copyright material (covered by the schools copyright agreement). There also appears to be no way to add in audio content… Something which has finally become easy in PowerPoint 2010.
I really like that you can now store any documents in your GDocs, and there are some interesting services that will sync your local files to GDocs (memeo and syncpacity) but they are quite expensive.
I like the idea of Google sites, but find it quite limited as your can only embed GDocs, not PDF documents (which is the format that most exam papers etc come in).
I also find it really odd that GApps doesn’t include any blogging or wiki systems, and all the other great things that google offer which are not integrated (reader, picasa etc)…
There is a lot to like about the GApps system, and many excellent and exciting features, and I certainly agree with those who say that this type of web based systems are the future, but I am not sure they are there yet…
I suspect many (most?) schools would find they still needed to keep a desktop version of office (whether MS or OO) for those occasions where GDocs isn’t up to the task yet…
I would love to hear from schools who use GDocs as to whether you still use MS office (or OO), particularly for use with the MIS. And how you manage having some local office docs and some cloud GDocs…
I’d love to know if others have had similar issues, and more importantly if anyone has found good solutions for these problems…
The other question that keep going through my mind whilst reading the #GTAUK tweets was: does a school with GApps still need a VLE, and if so which ones offer the best integration with GApps?