Customer Reviews

An Educator's Guide to Google Apps for Education

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First, it is important to understand what this book does not attempt to do, which may explain my disappointment. It does not attempt to look at Google Apps Education Edition as an email/groupware solution for a school. (As a Tech Director in a school that's what I was looking for.) It also makes no attempt to address the "problem areas" for using Google Apps in a school, such as inappropriate "gadgets" like "Hot Babes" available to teachers and students if you enable the Start Page or Google Sites. Another problem area not discussed is the need to assign access privileges individually instead of using groups or mail lists. Since it is a rather small book (115 pp.) I thought its rather expensive price tag might be worth it if if covered some of those topics. Instead, it just introduces the various Google-related applications and discusses advanced search techniques. Only the last 20 pages offer potentially useful classroom projects utilizing Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Calendar, Picassa, Google SketchUp and Blogger. Alas, the teacher website instructions do not correspond to the way Google Sites works in the current Google Apps Education Edition and seem to assume the teacher is using her/her own Google Apps account instead of a school domain. This may be explained by the 2007 copyright date. I hope more useful information for me will be found in other books that are less expensive and more up-to-date.