On day 10 of our series of answers from the UK Google Education Apps team we feature a question asked by Dave Stacey who teaches History at Olchfa School. He asked “Are you considering creating two tiers of user as quite a few schools have requested, one for students and one for teachers?”
Google replied:
The flexibility of Google Apps means that both students and teachers alike can use the product in the way that most suits their individual requirements. So, for example, we’ve seen that Google Talk is used by both students and teachers to answer homework queries and Google Calendar is used by teachers to share inter-departmental meetings and for students to be able to find out what’s going on throughout their school term. Equally, Google Docs allows you to control who you invite to view and collaborate on a document or presentation so that teachers can keep documents confidential if they need to. In this way, students and teachers should be able to tailor their use of Apps to reflect their own needs.
Today a school can choose if they want to offer different services to students and teachers by registering two separate domains. It is our belief, however, that to truly capitalise on the collaborative aspects of Google Apps (eg. homework) teachers and students should both have access to the same services.
Hummm.. Still not convinced by this answer I must be honest. I do feel that this feature would make Google Apps more functional for schools, frankly the whole two domains idea sounds like a recipe for trouble! Perhaps this is something that is more useful to education than to businesses or any other group Google are targeting the Apps package at, but something I think we should continue to nag them to develop!