Setting Up Google Apps For Education

We've been using GoDaddy for our Web Hosting, Mail Hosting, and DNS Services.  We have been using them since the school opened and have been pretty happy with them. Though, there are other services available and we are always looking at options. One option that many schools use is Google Apps For Education.  Since we are a school, Google offers their entire Email, Calendar,  and Apps suite for free.

This blog posting is a cronicle of our process of moving to Google Apps for our school .

1) Step One : Register Your Domain.
We already had an existing domain so we could have moved that to Google. Though, we had been looking at a shorter one for quite some time. We decided to coordinate the two events together.  For our domain services, I used DynDNS. I really like them. They have a nice web interface and reasonable prices.  Registering the domain was pretty straightforward. I also paid for their custom DNS service which I have found to be very helpful with DNS forwarding and sub domains.

2) Step Two: Set Up Your Domain With Google

You can go to the Google K-12 page and click on the Get Apps today button.  The page will have you set up your initial administrator account and then have you verify your domain.  Verifying your domain can be a bit tricky. You have some choices.

1. Add an HTML file to your web server to be downloaded via FTP.
2. Add a meta tag to your site's home page.
3. Add a DNS record to your domain's configuration
4.  Use a Google Analytics tracking code.

Since this was a new domain that did not have a web server or a FTP server set up, I had to go with Option #3.  This wasn't too difficult. I went back to DynDNS and added the record. 

 3) Step Three: Configure Google Apps
This part is pretty straightforward.  We were able to do it all from the Google apps Dashboard for our domain. The only part that was slightly tricky was setting up mail in DNS.  By default, your users will get to e-mail under the google domain. For example, in our case that would have been http://mail.google.com/a/scvi-k12.org.  We wanted our users to see their mail under our own domain, i.e. http://mail.scvi-k12.org. To fix this, you need to add a "MX" record to our DNS settings.  With DynDNS, this was not difficult.  I simply went to the DNS settings and added the servers that google suggested.

This allows our users to get to mail under http://mail.scvi-k12.org instead of http://mail.google.com/a/scvi-k12.org.

4) Step Four: Request NonProfit/Educational Status

The standard Google Apps domain only allows you to add 10 users.  You'll need to request to have your domain upgraded to Google Apps For Education.  This is done by using the Application Form on Google's Web Site.

5) Step Five: Add Users

In the long term, we'd like to have an internal LDAP server that stores all school accounts. This would include logins, passwords, and e-mail addresses for all staff and students. We could then drive Google from the LDAP logins.  However, this is beyond the scope of what we want to bite off right now.

For now, we will add users manually. For Facilitators, Staff, and Admin this will mean creating the account from the Google admin console.  For students, we are going to import users using a CSV file. We currently use Rediker to keep track of our student population. We can dump users out of Rediker and then process the information with a python script which creates a CSV file for Google. Here is the basic strategy of how the accounts will be named.

• Facilitators, Staff, and Admin : Google ID/ E-Mail name will be First.Last@scvi-k12.org  
• This is the same as we have now under the scvcharterschool.org domain.
  
• Google will replace our Go Daddy accounts, it will not be second account.  The legacy scvcharter accounts will be re-directed to Google.
  
• Learners: We have a few choices
• Short Unix name. i.e  John Doe -> jdoe@scvi-k12.org
• User chosen EdLine Screen Name : i.e John Doe -> ILikeLegos@scvi-k12.org
• Same algorithm as Staff i.e. John Doe -> John.Doe@scvi-k12.org 

 We are currently leaning towards Short Unix Names.  This is gives a visible distinction between staff and students and is consistent with what other schools are doing. We are still investigating how these will be grouped and what permissions will be allowed at each level. For example, we may not want all grades to be able to send e-mail from their Google ID.  When this is worked out, I'll put the details in a future posting.