How to Elect Google Apps at Your School [Free eBook]

Here at Backupify we’ve been touting the explosive growth of Google Apps for Education for quite awhile, beginning with our Growing up Google Infographic. Since then we’ve received great feedback from teachers and administrators alike regarding the power of Google Apps and how it has transformed their classrooms and schools. While many top educators see the value and power of Google Apps for Education, change can be difficult. To help sway the votes in your favor, we have collected the top 9 arguments for implementing Google Apps for Education. We hope these talking points help you convince your school that a move to Google Apps is a smart decision.

Arguments for Implementing Google Apps for Education

Powerful Teaching Tool

That schools exist to teach students is a given. Giving teachers a powerful tool designed specifically for an educational environment should be a no-brainer. Google Apps is a multi-purpose application suite with a myriad of educational and instructional benefits. Harnessing the power of the web opens the door for students to explore, collaborate and learn in a multi-media environment. Technology is evolving at lightning-like speeds so equipping the next generation with cutting edge tools is critical. Google Apps enables teachers to easily customize learning plans for individual students. Students learn at different paces and accommodating those differences makes for a more successful overall learning experience.

Enhances Student Learning

Students learn best when they don’t realize they are learning. That’s the type of experience Google Apps creates in the classroom. Whether setting up a website with Sites, collaborating on a project using Docs and Slides, or conducting a survey using Sheets and Forms, students exposed to a wide array of valuable tools they can use going forward. Feedback – a crucial component in the learning process – becomes extremely simple with Google Apps. teachers can share immediate and invaluable feedback on individual homework assignments, tests, and long-term projects. Google Apps also enables students to work with, help and learn from each other. They can collaborate on projects with Docs, share ideas with Slides, develop web pages with Sites and communicate with teachers with Chat and Gmail.

Simplifies IT Infrastructure Management

As a portable, accessible, application suite, Google Apps helps free up the time technical staff spends managing email servers, monitoring data storage, researching and providing further technology tools for teaching. IT administrators avoid the hassles and expense of staying on top of the latest upgrades and managing licenses for each application. Google takes care of everything and you are able to take advantage of improvements as they happen without requiring any time consuming intervention from your IT group. Because Google Apps accounts are normally generated from a school’s Active Directory, it can be used to easily sign up to non-Google services and ensure monitoring of what students are accessing. Without Google Apps, if a teacher wanted to use an online service with their students they would have to set up multiple additional accounts and individually manage them. Many popular services now allow users to log in with their Google Account, so this allows IT admins to centrally manage accounts for third-party services.

Accessible from Anywhere

One of the key advantages of Google Apps is that as a cloud-based application, it is accessible from anywhere on any device. Teachers and administrators can check their schedules in Calendar, chat with other teachers, or work on shared spreadsheets from any place with an Internet connection. This can be particularly helpful in the school environment where everything is compressed into shorter days and finding time to accomplish tasks can be problematic In many school districts, parents are forced to work multiple jobs and may not be able to participate during normal school hours, but they can still access their child’s work or teacher communication online in the evening hours. This type of flexibility allows teachers, students, administrators, and parents to stay connected even if they can’t be physically in the school due to illness or injury. We hope you find these 4 arguments for Google Apps for education helpful as you begin your own campaign to improve your school. To read all 9 arguments for Google Apps, download our eBook below: