A little bit of hometown news for MSPmentor today as Google announces that 697 K-12 public school districts in New York State will be going to their Google Apps cloud productivity suite. That’s over 3.1 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers all potentially going to Google Apps. Here’s the scoop.
The official Google Enterprise Blog entry didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal. But the effort was spearheaded, apparently, by the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in partnership with the New York State Teacher Centers and associated Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), New York State teacher unions, and New York State professional organizations.
Under this deal, 697 public school districts, as well as an undisclosed number of non-public and charter schools, state wide (note to out-of-towners: there is in fact more New York than the city), will receive access to the Google Apps for Education suite, which includes document editing, calendaring, messaging, and sitebuilding functionality — as well as training on how to use them.
NYIT is apparently handling Google Apps deployment for all the districts, but MSPmentor is wondering how they’re going to handle a project on such a scale — as with other Google Apps education deployments, there’s not obviously a partner lending a helping a hand. Either way, we’ll be keeping our eye on this deal going forward, so keep watching.
Oh, and one last thing: a Google spokesperson contacted us in regards to the news that several California State University campuses went with the competing Microsoft BPOS cloud suite to let us know that more than half of the other CSU schools have been on Google Apps for some time.
Disclosure: MSPmentor Editorial Director Joe Panettieri previously was editorial director at NYIT (2002-2004).
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Posted In: Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: BOCES | California State University | charter school | education cloud | Google | Google Apps | google apps for education | Microsoft | Microsoft BPOS | New York | new york city | New York Institute of Technology | New York school district | New York State | NYIT | public school
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Why does a private university have to spearhead this initiative? What’s in it for them? Well, let’s follow the money: Google Apps for Education is free (as in “free puppies”–someone still has to manage the Apps); the schools get a free resource to compliment or replace their existing groupware (Exchange, Lotus, etc.); the students get a free product that will excite them a bit more than Microsoft Office on an aging PC; NYIT? They get the money in the form of grants and teacher center funds to provide support and training! But, where are NYIT resources? Who is leading the initiative to deploy and train? I think that NYIT is simply going to be the gatekeeper to other private organizations who want in on the deployment and training dollars. The university gets nationwide coverage as part of a press release from Google, and they get to pick and choose who gets to work with districts on the initiative (you can guess how the process will work–it won’t be fair and equitable, but as a private university, they aren’t subject to regulation or oversight by state lawmakers like a SUNY school would be). The key to this whole announcement is that the schools can choose to use Google Apps or not–my guess is that with the conservative, unimaginative leadership most districts have in administration, instruction and technology, this won’t go far. Once you let students out onto the big, bad Internet, you lose the illusion of control that most district leaders treasure as a defense against the inevitable consequences of digital freedom. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks on that…