It’s a familiar tale: school IT departments expected to perform miracles as they transform precious financial resources into the diverse array of services demanded by today’s teachers and students. One interesting development of the past 12 months or so has been the tailoring of Web 2.0 services for business. Google and others (like Amazon Web Services) are increasingly making it so that companies, schools, etc get little advantage from hosting their own mail… and (it now seems) applications.

I’ve recently been thnking through the merits of Google Apps for education. I think this is definitely worth checking out.

Think about it:

- we and our students use the same applications whether we’re here or at home (or anywhere else for that matter)
- we (i.e. the school) don’t have to store any of this

- it’s 100% school branded (a key difference with our current email software)

- software is automatically upgraded and managed
- spam is automatically filtered
- our students get 6.5GB+ storage EACH in their email

- we get a beautiful set of APIs meaning that we can program stuff on our local network to exchange data with the google setup

- we can shift our focus to the higher-end multimedia, CAD, stuff etc… and on genuine learning technologies, rather than MS Office issues, spam filtering, etc.

- oh, yeah - did I mention it’s FREE?

Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) did an interview recently with a google guy about the new offline features of their docs - v. cool. Check it out >