Google Apps for Education

last revised 1-18-2008

We will be using a new suite of programs in this course, known collectively as Google Apps for Education. It is very important that you understand that by signing up to this course you are agreeing to use these applications.

They aren't very difficult, I promise, but nevertheless they are as much a requirement for this course as the textbooks or the online readings or the discussion board, so you should know what you're getting into. If you have qualms about this, you should probably drop the course. On the other hand, if you like the idea of being a pioneer, by all means stick around. It'll be fun!

What Is It?

Still with me? Good.

Google Apps for Education (GAEE) consists of the following:

We will also be making use of Google Earth.

In addition, we will be using WebBoard for our asynchronous class discussions, but that's outside the scope of this page, which is specifically about GAEE.

How Does This Work

You will receive a new account at Google. If you already have a Google account, this will be different from that one. Even though the account is "at" Google, the address will be u.boisestate.edu for you; it's just that the address instead of going through our campus mail system will in fact be going through Google.

Notice that this is different from your current Broncomail address. For a few weeks there will be an overlap—you'll keep your mail.boisestate.edu address but everything will get forwarded to u.boisestate.edu. After the cutover period, the mail.boisestate.edu address will go away entirely.

The OIT Help Desk is busy creating reference pages for all this. You can get to that here:
http://helpdesk.boisestate.edu/google/studentpilot/

Why?

Because we want to! <grin>

Seriously, the university is adopting GAEE, but we needed some places this spring where we could test everything and identify bumps in the road. I volunteered, which means I also volunteered you!

Since I'm not only a history professor but am also the University Web Administrator, you have a teacher uniquely positioned to help and guide you through the process. Our campus Help Desk is available as well.

What, Exactly, Will We Be Doing?

Glad you asked.

Gmail will be for direct communications between you and me, and between each other.

Calendar will hold all class events and deadlines. I have a web page listing these, but I'll be making a special class calendar, which you can integrate into your own calendar quite easily. You will also be able to use it (your choice) to make your own entries, like for group projects.

Talk is Google's chat service. I will have real-time online office hours two hours a week. Check the calendar for specifics. Here again, you could also use it to talk to one another, if that turns out to be useful.

Docs is a major one. You will do your term paper here, or at least you will post it here. You can compose it online or you can write it in your word processor and then paste the text into Google Docs. By sharing it with me, I'll be able to write comments directly into the paper. This is the main pedagogical experiment, at least for me.

So, that's not too bad, right? You'll use your gmail account for talking to the prof. You'll use Docs for your term paper. You'll use the calendar to remind yourself when assignments are due. That's about it!

Because this is a pilot project, I really want to hear about every bump in the road, every idea you had, every detail large or small relating to the GAEE aspect of the course. You should know that we're not looking to replace Blackboard with GAEE, but I've never used Blackboard anyway, so that's really a side issue.

This pilot project is really about technical matters. Does the system work? How does it work in your environment? Because I'm both a tech and a prof, I'm a natural for doing a pilot.