I've begun the process of getting Google Apps (Education edition) for school. There have been a few teething problems with the process; the Domain Host settings were a bit tricky to sort but in the end it was achieved and the domain has been verified by google.
At the moment we have google apps - standard edition. The differences with this is that it's limited to 50 users (we could request more if we wanted to), and it supports ads. The education version is ad free - always a positive when children are concerned.
Once the site was verified, google dropped me an email;
We've reviewed your request for Google Apps Education Edition, and need some additional information in order to confirm your status as a qualified educational institution.
To qualify for the Education Edition, we require that organizations meet the following criteria: -K-12 or higher educational institution, non-profit, accredited by a generally accepted accreditation body
If you do not meet all the above requirements, you can continue to use Google Apps Standard Edition, free of charge, for your organization, and you can contact us if you need more user accounts. If you feel that your organization does meet these criteria, please respond to this email with the following information:
- Name of your school
- Mailing address
- Phone number
- Domain administrator's name
- School Homepage
- List accreditation body or name of government ministry
We'll review your request and contact you via email.
Not quite sure which part of JUNIOR SCHOOL made them unsure about our educational status but, hopefully they'll reply soon and put us on the education version.
Interestingly, one of the features that can be used with the education version is google sites - self made webpages. I'm now thinking about the possibility that staff could use this facility to create their topic pages from the planning if they wanted. It seems that the more I look, the more I find google offering for free what our county is asking us to pay for.
So whilst I await a google email (and also the updating of some subdomains I've created for calendar/mail/sites and docs) I've been tweaking the settings within apps - including a school logo (rather than googles own), and altering the colour scheme to fit into the website / wiki colour scheme.
