Seven million students have gone Google...and we're road tripping!

Editor's note: We're sharing some news – and a cross post from the Official Google Blog – about a new milestone for Google Apps Education Edition: use by 7 million students and faculty worldwide.

Since the fall of 2009 we've seen more and more students and faculty take advantage of Google Apps Education Edition. We've seen our active users grow – first we had 5 million, then 6 million, and today we're happy to announce that we've crossed the 7 million mark. With so many students and faculty using Google Docs, Google Sites, and Gmail to collaborate and share their academic work, we figured it's the perfect time to hit the road and help more schools see Google Apps in action.

Beginning in April, the Google Apps Education team will travel to universities across the southern and eastern US to meet with regional CIOs and IT directors in higher education. We'll be hosting these events with some great universities using Google Apps, including Hofstra, Columbus State University, the University of South Florida, Texas Southern University, and the University of Virginia.

At every stop, the host universities will share how their students and/or faculty use Google Apps, and show how they've deployed and connected Apps within their technology infrastructure. We'll be devoting a lot of time for questions and we'll have plenty of demos from the Google Apps team. If you're a university CIO, CTO. or IT Director in New York, Florida, Georgia or Virginia (or nearby!) and would like to join us at a roadtrip stop, please let us know via this contact form. We hope to see you there!

Google Apps Education Edition CIO Roadtrip - Spring 2010

4/16 : Hofstra University
(in conjunction with the New York Higher Education Technology Forum)
Hempstead, NY

4/19 : University of South Florida
Tampa, FL

4/21 : Columbus State University
Columbus, GA

4/23 : University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Early June : Texas Southern University
Houston, TX

Posted by Jason Cook, Google Apps Education team

Faculty and staff are going Google, too

September was a big month for Google Apps Education Edition as everyone headed back to school. When we announced five million active users in early September, we didn't expect that it would only be about a month before we would announce that more than six million students, staff, and faculty at schools worldwide are now actively using Google Apps at school.

We talk a lot about what students want and need (and we also try to learn from them as much as possible), but it's important to remember that these six million users aren't only students – they are also faculty and staff members using Google Apps technology in education.

The cloud is all about collaboration, and this means not only students working together, but also students working with their teachers and professors to improve learning outcomes and save time. Using internet-based solutions like Google Apps to enhance the cycle of lesson, evaluation, and adjustment can shorten what used to take days or weeks into minutes, and collaborating in the cloud helps educators connect more effectively with students.

There are lots of examples we're seeing crop up on campuses. For example New York City's Intermediate School 339 ensured clear communication between students, teachers, and the community by moving the entire campus to Google Apps, and taking advantage of features like forms in Google Docs to create real-time quizzes helped to double Math performance scores, increase attendance, and build student engagement.

And, after Boise State University migrated their 2,400 faculty and staff to Google Apps, not only were they able to foster better collaboration between students and staff, but they reduced costs for IT infrastructure, support, and maintenance by $90,000 annually.

Other schools that have chosen Google Apps for their faculty and staff include Temple University, Columbus State University, Abilene Christian University, Macalester College, Manhattan College, Mary Baldwin College, Northeastern State University, and Saint Louis University (including 8,500 staff from their Medical Center and Hospital).

We strongly believe that when all education users - from students to professors to school administrators - have access to cloud-based tools and aren't limited by where or when they work, it enhances their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. So come on, Go Google and join these schools (and many others) in the cloud with Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

UK Universities going Google

Last month, we announced that over 5 million students were actively using Google Apps Education Edition. Today, we're pleased to note that several noteworthy universities in the UK have joined this growing movement by announcing plans to deploy Google Apps for the coming academic year.

The University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Portsmouth and De Montfort University are the latest to sign on with Google Apps, joining established UK Apps users like the University of Westminster and Leeds Met.

We recently mapped Google Apps' adoption in schools across the globe, but we think it's just as interesting to hear how students from the University of Portsmouth are logging in from 26 countries in 10 languages while studying abroad – all in the first month of using Apps. With tools like integrated video chat and real-time collaboration, Google Apps are working in the cloud to make the world a little bit smaller, while making campuses larger than ever.

To read more about UK universities that have gone Google, click here.

Posted by Jason Cook, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

Columbus State University goes mobile with Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Robert Diveley, Executive Director of Operations at Columbus State University's Office of Information and Technology Services, as our guest blogger today. Robert's post describes how his school has provided real-time access to student information using Google Mobile Apps.

Columbus State University, located in Columbus, Georgia, started using Google Apps Education Edition in early 2009 and has since successfully implemented Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Video on campus. One challenge for our university, as with many others in today’s economy, is that student enrollment continues to rise while budgets remain flat. Accordingly, it's been pretty tough for us to keep pace with the IT demand.

We recently surveyed our students and learned that, no surprisingly, they strongly preferred to communicate with our school via cell phone andPDA . So we thought that we could get ahead of the curve by offering information live on these devices, allowing our students access to the latest information available and being able to avoid lines and other communications slow-downs, especially at the beginning of new terms.

To solve our problem we looked to Google for guidance on how to interface Google Mobile Apps with our Student Information System. We began our development process using the tools provided through Google’s online developer kit and even enlisted some Columbus State University students to take part in the project by taking advantage of the Android for Beginners group.

Thanks to this integration, the information we are now able to provide in real-time from our Student Information System onto cell phones and PDAs includes:

• Student Account Information – amount owed, refund available, holds on account
• Student Scholastic Information – GPA, adviser contact and grades
• Student’s Individual Schedule of Classes
• Required Documents – Financial Aid, Immunization
• University Activity Schedule
• University Sports Schedule
• Shuttle Bus Schedule
• Campus Map
  
  
  

We've included two screen shots displaying what students can see on their mobile devices below:

We foresee that the use of Mobile Apps will add to our customer service capabilities and allow students to more easily find information that might otherwise require phone calls or lines. Our ultimate goal is to duplicate all of the services that we now provide to students through our university portal. By doing so students will literally have all of our services on hand at all times.

As you can see, delivering this information on a mobile device makes everything easier for our students and proactively addresses frequently asked questions, helping students successfully take charge ofthier own issues and needs.

Robert Diveley, Executive Director of Operations
Office of Information & Technology Services, Columbus State University

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education team

Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

Google Apps for Education webinar with Arizona State University

We're passionate about learning here at Google and always revel in the innovations that educators drive when they work with Google Apps. To share some of the latest innovations we've seen in this arena, we're hosting a free, live educational webinar to show the power of Google Apps Education Edition. In this session you'll hear directly from Arizona State University, the first school to deploy Google Apps Education Edition. Learn about their 2006 decision to go with Google Apps, the results they've seen so far, and their future plans for working and teaching with Google Apps. Details follow:

Google Apps for Education
Thursday, June 25, 2009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

We hope you'll join us to learn how Google Apps can help institutions like ASU save money and IT resources, all while making it easier for teachers to innovate and for students to learn and work together.

Read today's news about Google in education, and what schools are learning as they start using Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education marketing team

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New for Google Apps Admins: an online community

Listening to Google Apps admins talk – with us and with each other – made it clear: as IT professionals, admins wanted a way to connect online somewhere in the Google environment. We heard a clear call for a gathering place, or community – a meeting point where admins could meet one another, identify each other by business type or geography, discuss topics unique to their roles, and share learning and best practices in a way that helped in their professional roles.

We wanted to make the site relevant and easy for admins to use, and we also wanted to use Google Apps as fully as we could. So we used Google Sites, of course, and integrated the Google products that most admins already use, like Google Maps, Moderator, and Forms. A few highlights:

• The Admin community map – allows admins to easily see where their fellow community members are located; also highlights further information with a "click" on the marker.
  
  

• "Share your perspective " – uses Google Moderator to let admins easily add their own comments to posted topics, or vote on comments added by others. We've set this up to feature four topics at a time, so there's always something to talk about.

• "Stay Current " – the latest product information and posts to the Admin Help forum, so that Admins can see what's being discussed in Support
  

We want this forum to create a sense of connectedness and community among the people who work as admins for Google Apps – a place where they can learn from each other, share what they've learned, and create a dialog that can help all of us learn. We also want it to be a place where people considering Google Apps can come in and find out more about what it offers, so we made this an "open" environment, where people can easily invite colleagues who might want to know more. There's even a way to send an email right from the forum itself.

The Google Apps team hopes that this community adds value for admins, and we hope you'll take a look today.

Posted by Monali Narayanaswami, Google Apps team

Our first (but not last) Education Customer Summit

A few weeks ago we held our first Google Apps Education Customer Summit here at the Googleplex (our Mountain View main campus), where we hosted 58 of the newest members in our Education Edition family. These customers represented 27 universities, community colleges, and K-12 schools from across the U.S. who recently moved over to Google Apps Education Edition. This Education Customer Summit provided these schools an opportunity to network with each other, hear from product specialists, and meet other customers who have been using Google Apps since the early days.

We kept the participants busy all day with many lively sessions kicking off with a customer panel that included Columbus State University, Boise State University, and San Mateo Community College District providing insights into Google Apps successes on their respective campuses.

Next, product managers and engineers led a discussion about products and features, answering a range of audience questions. This let everyone learn about some new features in detail, including improved contact sharing, the updated start page in Sites, and the new reporting in the control panel.

We hope this day was as fun and valuable for the customers as it was for us, and enabled the school representatives to go back to campus with new contacts and ideas about how to make the most of Google Apps for their students, staff, and faculty. Check out the pictures below, and maybe we'll see you at the next Summit.

Jeff Keltner, Google business development manager, kicks things off and welcomes new members of the Apps Education Edition family.

Jeff and Tudd Sutton (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) field audience questions during the customer panel.

It was a busy day for the 58 participants, but we made sure to give a refreshment break or two...

Product engineers discussed Google Apps in depth and shared insight about what's in the works.

Posted by Lauren Miskelly, Enterprise Sales Representative

Schools in India get the "App"titude

In a recent post, we expressed our delight about all the global growth we're seeing lately for Google Apps Education Edition. The increased adoption of schools moving to Apps has been particularly significant in India, especially as a result of our recent Got the "App"titude Challenge. This competition encouraged students, faculty members, and alumni from engineering and management schools throughout India to move their institutions to Google Apps.

The challenge created quite a stir, attracting more than 6,000 teams consisting of students, faculty, and alumni since its launch in August. Each team worked with their own IT staff to identify challenges and limitations with their existing email and collaboration systems, and then – working with a Google representative – demonstrated the ways in which Google Apps could mitigate these issues.

As a result of the challenge, more than 100 colleges across India are now in the process of implementing Apps on their campuses. Some of these schools include Jaypee Business School, National Institute of Technology - Calicut, Zakir Husain College of Engineering & Technology, and Aligarh Muslim University.

The performance of each team was evaluated by measuring product usage after their deployment. We'd like to extend our congratulations to the XL CONNECT team from Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) - Jamshedpur, who won the challenge by demonstrating the highest usage of Google Apps products. This team ran a pilot and implemented Google Apps within less than a month from the day they secured approval from their college's decision makers. They also conducted marketing campaigns to inspire students to find innovative ways to use Google Apps tools. Chintan Agarwal, secretary of the Systems Society at XLRI says, "Considering the need for a networked manager and the high reliability and usability of Google Apps, we have rolled-out Apps services for all XLers, including international students at Singapore and Dubai."

Below is a map of all the schools across India who will be rolling out Apps on campus after participating in the challenge. We look forward to continuing to fill up the map as more schools across the globe get the "App"titude.

Posted by Gagandeep Singh and Jolly Ngemu, Google Apps India team

10 Gigs of Virtual Class (or Virtual Talent Show) for Free

In the past week, we've released some cool new features in Google Video for education in Google Apps, including captioning of audio tracks, and ability to upload videos up to 1GB in size for users with Google Gears-enabled browsers. We mentioned that both of these features may be useful for schools, and now we'd like to make them easier to try.

As of March 31st, we will be offering 10GB of Google Video free to every Google Education Edition domain. This will give each school the ability to stream up to 30 hours of content of anything they want - be it 30 hours of Physics 101 lectures, 30 hours of little league soccer practices or 30 hours of commencement keynotes – or a mix of those.

When we originally added Google Video to the Apps suite, we offered it for free for a trial period, but promised a change in our policy this March (right now). And here's that promised change. Now you can store 10GB of video and trade out old video for new, knowing that your current 30 hours is always available on our servers.

So start your video cameras and capture your professors (or your students) in the act; we'll provide the storage; the popcorn's up to you.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google Apps Education Edition Team

Students share their Google Apps stories

Editor's note: We've had enough interest in this story, which ran yesterday on the Official Google Blog, to share it again here. If you are using (or interested in using) Google Apps and other Google solutions in education, be sure to watch the video – and use comments, below, to fill us in on Google Apps stories from your school.

You might remember reading our posts from the road when we hit the streets and headed "App to School" in our retro bio-fuel bus (below) to visit ten universities across the U.S. that used Google Apps. One of our main goals for this trip was to hear from the technology experts themselves -- the students -- about how they were using Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, and Talk to be more effective on and off campus.


Luckily we had a video camera along for the ride, and we filmed a bunch of students telling their stories. Every week we'll share a new video on the Google Students blog, so you can hear from the students themselves and hopefully learn a few new ways to use these products. If you want to make sure you catch all the latest videos, and stay up-to-date about other news and tips for students, you can subscribe to the student blog.

Here's one video from a student who uses Google Calendar to manage lab studies with his classmates:



Can't wait another week to see more videos? Check out our playlist. And if you have your own story to share, we encourage you to upload it as a response.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager, Google Apps for Education