Joel Zehring

My district is shopping for a student email solution, and I think Google Apps Education Edition should be at the top of our list of possible tools. The following is an email draft that I’m planning to send to the members of our district technology advisory board prior to their next meeting, where I’ll give my Google Apps presentation. Cold-start meetings waste a ton of face-to-face time, so I’m hoping this email will give us some runway to launch into discussion about the best tool to meet the needs of our students and employees.

First, I’d like to frame the problem: We need a tool that engages students and employees in online collaboration. There’s a cost to using any tool, including time investment or financial investment. We need a tool that delivers extensive benefits to students and employees with minimal investment of time and money.

Next, the pitch: Google Apps Education Edition is the best solution I’ve seen for our problem. The suite includes applications for email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and website design. It’s all web-based, so users can access the full-featured tools from any computer with internet connection.

Google Apps are designed around collaboration, rather than just providing individual productivity. Conversations over email are threaded to show the back-and-forth dialog. Multiple users can edit a single document or spreadsheet simultaneously. Internal and public publishing is built in to every application for quick, secure sharing with a class, a school, the whole district, or the whole world. Best of all, Google regularly updates its applications with new features and improvements, so we know that we’re investing in a tool that will grow as our needs grow and change.

I’ve included a few links below if you would like to learn more before our meeting:

Information and examples:

• Google Apps for Education – Free email and apps for schools
• Google Message Security for K-12 Powered by Postini
• My class blog (created with Google Sites)
• IDEAL portal (Teachers can try Google Apps for free through Arizona’s Department of Education.)

Video links:

• Why Google Apps for Education? Overview of Gmail in Google Apps
• Share a Calendar Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Docs in Plain English

If I’ve missed anything, make sure to straighten me out in the comments.

Dan Pink asserts in this video that the modern workplace will thrive on three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

I especially like the idea of a FedEx day. What if teachers the district were given a full day to work on anything they wanted? We’d only need one rule:

You have to present your creation to the rest of the staff at the end of the day.

This kind of self-directed development reminds me of the Idea Stock Market that I wrote about a while back. With any luck (and leadership), the days of stale, stagnant professional development are numbered.