[K12OSN] OT: Google Apps

David Hopkins dahopkins429 at gmail.com
Mon Dec 8 15:51:37 UTC 2008


> James P. Kinney III wrote:
>>>
>>> Google apps have less than half the capabilities of OpenOffice but are
>>> accessible from (nearly) any Internet accessing computer. The
>>> performance issues you see are bandwidth for the classroom, not system
>>> resource problems.
>>>
>>
>> Seems to me that people like Google apps for the convenience of
>> accessing their data anywhere.  Why not just give each student and
>> teacher a $5 usb key and have them work on their local machine (be it at
>> home or at school)?
>
> People lose USB drives. And Google Apps sharing features (sharing calendars,
> sharing documents) are pretty nice too. It's just convenient and requires
> zero maintainance and nearly zero setup. That's probably why people like
> Google Apps.
>

This morning we tested Opera on a couple of accounts.  Google Apps
complains that Opera isn't a supported browser.  We choose to continue
and it seems to work anyway though.  I didn't see a big difference in
the load on the system with just a few accounts being used.  I also
tried Konqueror and that wouldn't work at all with Google Apps, not
sure what settings would have to be tweaked.

As for the USB drives, the latest issue is that kids are showing up
with USB drives that have been formatted by Vista and can't be read.
That is the real issue with them at the moment.




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