Google Sites anybody using it?

[JJonas]

Looking to find other Google Sites users.

We are thinking of using this as a VLE/Storage/email solution had some positive feedback so far but cant find out how to hand in homework?

Would be nice if we could set a homework deadline as well.

or can we do anything similar to this?

[p858snake]

Google Sites is a Webhosting service (html only last time a checked) and not a VLE system, they are completley differnt. VLEs run off a web hosting service and generally need a database backend (mySQL for example) and a server side scripting language (php for example).

[JJonas]

Sorry this should be in the VLE bit any chance of getting it moved?

[ronnoco]

Google Apps meets all of the Becta requirements of a VLE. Schools are entitled to the premier version at absolutely no cost, usually £33 per year per user.

It includes Google mail with a 7GB limit as standard, Google Docs, Google sites for building sites - you can insert video, blogs, images, gadgets (some are excellent - live tv) and much more. There is a private video section as well as Google Wave which is a platform, product, and protocol for creating live, social communication documents.

Students can share documents so they can be edited or marked by teachers and there seem to be other ways of doing the hand in. You can create new users in 15 seconds and I believe the limit is 3000! There is a powerful admin interface which includes excellent e-mail monitoring and restricting, you can add keywords to be filtered and blocking e-mail from being sent to certain domains, i.e. hotmail. It also supports LDAP and SSO.

The only downside we have found so far is that you can only upload 1 file at a time in sites although you can do multiple uploads in Docs and then link from there. This is a flaw but hey, it's free...we can live with it!

[Hightower]

Google Apps meets all of the Becta requirements of a VLE. Schools are entitled to the premier version at absolutely no cost, usually £33 per year per user.

It includes Google mail with a 7GB limit as standard, Google Docs with 25GB of space, Google sites for building sites - you can insert video, blogs, images, gadgets (some are excellent - live tv) and much more. There is a private video section as well as Google Wave which is a platform, product, and protocol for creating live, social communication documents.

Students can share documents so they can be edited or marked by teachers and there seem to be other ways of doing the hand in. You can create new users in 15 seconds and I believe the limit is 3000, all with a total of 32GB of space! There is a powerful admin interface which includes excellent e-mail monitoring and restricting, you can add keywords to be filtered and blocking e-mail from being sent to certain domains, i.e. hotmail.

The only downside we have found so far is that you can only upload 1 file at a time in sites although you can do multiple uploads in Docs and then link from there. This is a flaw but hey, it's free...we can live with it!

Sounds great, oh wait, I have a student who has just deleted all of his work by accident..... now what?

[JJonas]

Sounds great, oh wait, I have a student who has just deleted all of his work by accident..... now what?

you undelete it from the trash.

[ronnoco]

They still have access to our domain with their own user area which is backed up every night. We also sell 4GB memory sticks and have sold hundreds.

Students are learning to take responsibility for backing up their data....if they know from the word go it's down to them, I don't see it as a problem. We have media students who due to the size of their data we have told them they need to take full resposibility and ownsership and this system has worked for 2 years +.

[vikpaw]

Sorry this should be in the VLE bit any chance of getting it moved?

Moving to VLE forum.

[NewOrder]

An issue you may have is with Safe Guarding and Data protection. You will need to check with Google where they host ? Microsoft live@edu is in Ireland therefore a sfe harbour for DP.

[bensewell]

Dont forget about live@edu with Moodle integration. This gives the users live apps and sharepoint will be on board very soon.

[gshaw]

I personally wouldn't say Google Apps on its own is a VLE per-se, it's a set of tools yes but there's no facility to structure courses in the usual VLE way. Arguments could be made to say the traditional VLE could be old-fashioned and it's all about student-owned tools but I'm not so sure.

You can integrate Google Apps with Moodle, we've gone with Live@Edu as we mainly teach MS Office and our students didn't like GMail's interface. We're using the Live@Edu plugin on Moodle to display emails, quick shortcuts to create documents with the web apps etc... can't wait for the SharePoint based (note not full product) student tools to go online