Pawa IT Powering Power! Schools in Kenya
In a bid to increase help more schools reach new heights delivering the best education, Pawa IT has collaborated with some international schools to deploy Google Apps for education.
If you are an avid reader of out blog then you know we have been doing this for a while now but if this is your first time here, let me break it down for you
After our visit to the international school of Lusaka in Zambia, we realized we had traveled a long way when our home country Kenya still has some International Schools we had not yet reached.
We identified some International schools aka K12 schools and pitched to them the advantages of going Google!. Schools like
were immediately interested in using some of the services offered by Google for education. For those not familiar with Google Apps, let me give you a brief and quick introduction. Google Apps has these core applications (There are so many Google Apps, this are just but the main ones)
- Gmail-The popular email application from Google
- Drive-Your online storage and document editing center-Schools can now request for unlimited storage on Drive
- Calendar-Your virtual Calender with a lot of tricks and features
- Sites-Everyone at your school can create their own website
- Hangouts-Video Conferencing Made simple and feature packed
- Docs-Word Processing at its best
- Sheets-Create, edit and collaborate on spreadsheets easily
- Slides-Making a Presentation has never been easier
Different schools and institutions have different reasons for going Google. Many learning institutions usually target the collaboration and communication features. We are aware of the many services out there that can be made to provide similar services, but not at the level that Google has reached. Sharing documents is fast and easy. Creating web pages happens in minutes (No HTML or CSS knowledge required). Getting reminders about school events can be pushed directly to your phone using Google Calendar and so forth.
The other reason that many of the K12 schools are opting to go Google, is the level of Control offered by Google Apps. With Google Apps, the administrator gets to decide exactly who can use what and for what purpose. This level of control extends even to devices (If you are using Chromebooks).
As an example, you can decide to have preschoolers using only Google Drive and have the rest of the services disabled. Or you can decide to have the senior students use Gmail, calendar and drive and disable all the other services. The good news is that, this is easy to implement but you have to plan for it early during the deployment stages (this is not to say you cant do it after the deployment, its way easier to do it during the deployment phases as opposed to after). We as Pawa IT specialize in helping schools and even businesses do exactly that. We also value your privacy and as such, we only step in to help out with best industry practices working closely with your IT team
Following the above brief introduction, I am sure all of us are now on the same page. Let me now give you a brief summary of what we did for the schools I mentioned above
Rusinga School
Rusing School were mostly interested in the communication aspect of Google thus their main interest was Gmail. We helped them from the initial stages including; signing up for Google Apps, verifying domain ownership, creating unique usernames for their students and staff and enabling/ Disabling services for different organizations. Communication is a very important factor in the growth of any institution. In order to increase efficiency and reduce on the downtime experienced by many local email servers, Rusinga decided to switch to Google Apps. Did I mention that Google guarantees an up time of 99.9%- such numbers are unheard of in local mail server setups.
If you are worried about the learning curve that your employees may have to go through before switching to Google Apps, we provide training services for both the students and staff-Did I mention Pawa IT has the only two Google Apps Certified Trainers in Kenya!-actually East Africa! There is also something called dual delivery of mail.
Dual delivery of mail is a service offered by Google to help make the transition to Google Apps smooth and less troublesome. It works by forwarding a copy of each email you receive to your legacy server’s inbox (that’s after changing the MX records to point to Google Servers). Its good to mention that this should be taken as a temporary step to help your employees get used to Google Apps before a complete switch over. However, if for some reason you prefer to have your local mail server run alongside Google, you can for as long as you want, no problem
Brookhouse
Brookhouse were also interested in the communication aspect as well as Drive and Classroom. Their students had email accounts but for learning purposes, it is advisable to use institution based email accounts from Google Apps. This is because it provides a good level of control and its easier to create groups for sharing data and information with the students. You can easily reset the students passwords (in case they forget them- which they do-a lot), you can back up a colleagues data and delete their account in case they are leaving, did I mention you get unlimited online storage for your files in Google Drive with your school account? Those are just some of the few reasons that led to Brookhouse signing up for Google Apps
Kenton College
Kenton College was mostly interested in Google Classroom. For those not familiar with Classroom, its a simple assignment management system that integrates with Google Drive and Gmail to provide a smooth assignment disbursement, submission and grading system. Classroom provides a very easy to use UI making it very easy for teachers to create classes, set up assignments and track who has/ has not done and returned the assignment. This coupled with the power of Google drive, is the ultimate experience for a teacher, especially those managing e-Learning
We helped Kenton college create classes, add teachers and finally trained them on how to use Classroom
Conclusion
If you have read this post till the end, I am sure you would like to deploy Google Apps for your institution. Remember, you do not have to use all of the services offered by Google, you can use any combination of the above mentioned products, however, for the ultimate experience, I suggest using all of the ones listed above
Here are a few things to consider if you would like to deploy Google Apps for your school
- Google Apps for Education is free!
- Security under Google Apps is guaranteed-All the services now use https to ensure that your data is secure
- You have control over what happens to your data-Google Doesn’t interfere in any way with your data
And last but not least, We are here to help you get the best out of Google Apps.
