My wife's school has been building their "intranet" for 6 years. The technology is bleak, the UI bleaker, the user experience atrocious and the uptime minimal, It is ugly, hard to use and hardly ever works. To cast the technology of the school system as inadequate is to injustice to all the inadequacies in the world.
Now Google offers this amazing suite of apps (that already existed) and shows the schools how to use them in a productive and powerful way. It costs the schools nothing, eliminates the incredible incompetancies of its IT staff and empowers teachers and students alike. Wow. Sometimes I say disparaging things about the little search engine company, but this time I applaud them.
"Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school's logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."
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