1. Thumb drive — offline, convenient, cheap, student controlled

2. Hard drive backup — either on their local machine, or an external — offline, and in the case of an external HD, you get enormous amounts of storage space for little money.

3. Jungle Disk — it costs 3.40/month for 20GB of storage, and has far better ToS and privacy policy that Google

4. Their own web space — I commonly use personal server space as data storage — but then I’m also wearing a propeller hat and a pocket protector as I type this

With that said, Google docs isn’t a bad option for individual use. But relying on Google for *everything* is not a particularly good choice, for reasons I delve into in greater detail below.

Cheers,

Bill

Nothing is free. If you look at Google’s education agreement here: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/education_terms.html — you see that use of Google apps requires the schools to leave Google’s branding intact.

Additionally, if you look at paragraph 12, you will see that Google makes no guarantees at all that the service will actually be up — which, if the anecdotal evidence I have come across is to be believed, is a very good thing, because people have complained of flaky service.

But hey, it’s free.

Then, you get to Google’s privacy policy at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/privacy.html — my favorite thing about this policy is that it actually contains links to 6 different privacy sub-policies, and they all guarantee Google’s right to data mine your use patterns in the interest of advertising more effectively.

So, if Google apps were adopted district wide, you would effectively be advertising every student in the district in an unpaid market research study. I would strongly encourage any parent in a district encouraging such a move to require that the district ensure the privacy oy my child’s personal information.

Don’t get me wrong — I understand the financial attraction. But this masks a more fundamental issue: schools should not have to be going hat in hand to get funds for basic necessities, technological or otherwise. Outsourcing infrastructure to the worlds most efficient data miner is not an attractive solution. This is less a technological issue, and more a policy issue as it related to school funding.

Regarding the legality, I am using Google Apps Team Edition (http://www.google.com/apps/edu/index.html) which is specifically marketed towards students. It doesn’t require IT support, but has the same functionality as Google Apps for Education. This is legal for me to use (though I of course have another google account too)

For backups, I have built a simple little script using Google’s API (http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html) which automatically grabs the html of all my documents and checks them into subversion nightly. Since everything is in HTML, I am assured of not losing any data. As a side note, Google now has offline access easily to Google Docs via Google Gears.

Really, I am amazed that schools don’t encourage the use of Google Docs through the education initiatives. Don’t get me wrong: I know how hard it is to convince the powers that be to switch, but I just wish someone would have some sense. Ironically, this whole server crash arose from the need to add yet more space… if we just used Google Apps every student would have 10gb+ of space-for free, accessible anywhere.

Heck, I’m not complaining: I have all my docs safe, yet can still take advantage of extensions from teachers. Plus, it lends new weight to my efforts for adopting Google Apps district-wide.

So, I’ve been using a combination of flash drives and online storage/editors to ensure that I’ve always got a copy on-hand.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html

Your IT people can link their AD or Open Directory structure to Google’s so there is a single login for students. They’ll get access to all the google tools. Google can also host email for schools using this solution. It comes complete with google gmail addresses that end in @yourschoolsdomain.com or whatever. We’d like to go with it, but haven’t worked out all the kinks so we can abide by our email retention policy.

OUTSOURCE

“The cool thing, is the tech just said “keep it quiet”.

Here we have an adult advocating a child breaking the rules. The tech could be a person who just wants to look cool to the kids or be their friend. Often, though, this is the first step an abuser/child predator uses to gain a child’s trust.

Also, as adults in schools, we must maintain a moral high ground. Even if we disagree with system policies, we need to adhere to the policies around the children we teach or come in contact with.

The filter policies are there to protect the students and an expensive infrastructure. I know that many who respond to this blog desire much more liberal access to resources but some restraints on technology are appropriate. In a perfect world, every teacher maintains a classroom of respect and order where every students’ needs are met and the students use all available tools appropriately to learn and grow into enlightened adults. Unfortunately, there are teachers who do not monitor student internet access and there are students who, when given respect and whose needs are met, STILL breaks the rules and tries to break the system.

We need to be careful about what we consider “cool”.