This year, I talked our charter organization’s IT master into switching all our (5) schools and the main office to Google Apps for your Domain. This means that our schools don’t have to maintain their own email servers anymore…. all of the backend is provided by Google, although we still keep the our own domains (like envisionschools.org). Now our email is as powerful as Gmail and we’re all automatically linked in Google Calendars, Docs, Talk, Pages, and so on. It has enabled the organization to standardize how we communicate, and it’s an easy sell because it’s FREE to do, it improves email reliability, and it frees your IT people to work on other problems.

Since it’s free, we even rolled out email addresses for all students at our domains which has helped facilitate EVERYONE being connected to shared GDocs, Gmail, and GTalk. Here is their sales blurb

______________________________________________________________________

Google innovation. Powerful solutions. Zero investment.

Imagine
how valuable it would be if your entire campus community — students,
faculty, and staff — could share information and ideas more easily.
With Google Apps Education Edition’s free communication, collaboration
and publishing tools, including email accounts on your school’s domain
(like student@your-school.edu), you can start bringing that vision to
life. Learn more

You
can select any combination of our available tools and services and
customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content.
Manage your users through a web-based control panel, or use the APIs to
integrate Google Apps into your existing systems.

Best
of all, it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software
to download, install or maintain. You can get up and running quickly
with minimal support from your IT staff. Learn how

Communicate and connect			Collaborate and publish			Manage your services
	Gmail Email with 6.699276 GB of storage per custom email account, mail search tools and integrated chat.			Start Page Access your inbox, calendar, docs and campus info, plus search the web from one place.			Control Panel Manage your domain and user accounts online.
	Google Talk Free text and voice calling around the world.			Google Docs Create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time.			Extensibility APIs Integrate with your existing IT systems or 3rd party solutions.
	Google Calendar Coordinate meetings and school events with sharable calendars.			Google Sites One-stop sharing for team information.			Help and support Online troubleshooting and extended hours phone support for critical issues.

Learn more about the applications available through Google Apps.

The beauty of these apps is that they allow multiple users to edit the same document at the same time, so you can get a whole group of people looking at (and adding to) the same document. Simple idea, but revolutionary ramifications.

Our school does a lot of group projects, and inevitably, we are forced to designate one student in the group as “the writer” because only one student could write the script at a time. That student usually did nmore work than everyone else and the whole system was unfair. Until now. Now, we can assign all students to make edits to the script, and we can see who edited what (minute by minute, edit by edit) in the “revisions” section. You, the teacher, can have students “share” docs with you, and then make comments on it as they’re working. They can see your comments, answer, and revise before your very eyes. I have even switched over to having all my papers turned in this way because 1) I don’t like handling paper, and 2) I can let the computer track and organize who turned in what when. I just have to read and respond!

I could go on and on about Gdocs, but I urge you to bring it in to your organization and see how it helps you and your colleagues work!