At Moreau Catholic High School we believe that technology is an integral part of our students’ lives and futures. At Moreau Catholic, technology is a ubiquitous part of the learning environment. At Moreau, access to the best technology tools to enhance student learning is a top priority.
So, this year, Moreau Catholic goes Google! Students, faculty and staff will return to campus with an impressive array of communication and collaboration tools at their disposal through the use of Google Apps for Education.
Google Apps for Education is Google’s set of hosted and customizable communications services. Moreau Catholic students, faculty and staff now have access to free communications tools including email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under the moreaucatholic.org domain name.
MCHS Director of Technology, Shawna Martin, explained the reason for adopting the Google Apps set of tools. “We were looking for a cost-effective solution to help us expand our email capacity both in terms of the volume of users and the amount of storage available to them. Google Apps allows each user up to 7 GB of free storage for email and also provides essential services like email archiving and spam filtering. Additionally, we also can provide all of our users consolidated access to the other excellent tools in Google Apps. And all of this comes bundled at the most cost-effective price – free!”
Martin explained that the new email interface is very similar to the old, uses the same email addresses, and is available at the same web address, http://mail.moreaucatholic.org. Google’s minimum length requirement for passwords did mandate a small change. “All passwords for email have had the word moreau added to them to make sure that they met the minimum length standard. So if your old email password was xxx22, your new email password is now xxx22moreau.”
Once students login to their email, they will also have access to Google’s other communication and collaboration applications under the moreaucatholic.org domain name. All services are hosted by Google and are available to users via any web-based computer. Google Apps includes the following services:
• Gmail™ – provides users with 7 gigabytes of storage, highly effective spam filtering and powerful search. Gmail includes instant messaging within the email interface. Available at mail.moreaucatholic.org;
• Google Calendar™ – is an online calendar that makes it easy for people to organize their lives and share schedules with others. Available at calendar.moreaucatholic.org;
• Google Talk™ – lets users make PC-to-PC voice calls and send instant messages to each other for free. Available through the mail interface;
• Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Drawings™ – allows people to create and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and drawing without the need to email attachments back and forth. Different people from within the school can work on a document at the same time. All revisions are recorded for editing, and controls enable people to define who can and cannot share the information. Available at docs.moreaucatholic.org; and
• Google Sites™ – This what-you-see-is-what-you-get web page authoring tool lets users build simple web pages publish them to the web even if they don’t have any website building experience. Students will use Google Sites to build online portfolios of their work. Available at sites.moreaucatholic.org; and
• Google Groups™ – Groups let students and teachers form groups to facilitate communication and collaboration. Available at groups.moreaucatholic.org.
Google Apps for Education has recently announced that they will be expanding their offerings to include all of the other Google applications currently in development including Google Wave, Google Voice and Picasa. Implementation of these apps will be rolled out during the Fall of 2010.
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