Google dashboard

I want it.

The product is basically an educational wrapper around the Google docs. They intend to wrap it around the other google things, gmail, blogger etc, as time goes on. It has been developed in partnership with Point England schools.

What the dashboard offers teachers are some excellent tools to make managing the class easier. It includes automatically sharing everything with the teacher, automatic creation of shared folders, the ability to log on _as_ any student, backups so a kid can't delete the work. The dashboard view made it really easy to see what the kids had been working on based on which folder they had put the work in (Maths work in the maths folder etc). I can really see it making things much easier to manage. It would probably make things easier for newbies.

The thing that I think would be the most useful is the automated setup functions. It will integrate with KAMAR and when a student joins it will generate an account for them and set it up with the right folders with the right sharing :-) This will take heaps of hassle away from the first few weeks. It also provides a parent portal, something we can't do at the moment.

The downside is that as it is all live it has to query google lots to generate the page. This may not work until we get our network issues sorted. If the proxy refuses a connection half way through it will really screw things up.

They reckon it takes order of 1 day to set up and they are happy to set it up for a tiny test group. The pricing is about $4 per student per year. We'll need to check about how transients will fit in.

I would love to trial it with my Year 9s this year to get a feel for it. They sound really happy to make this happen.


The services they offer are:
Account management
Authentication
Environment provision
Policy enforcement
Dashboard
Parent Portal
Portfolio management