St Johnsbury has been using Gaggle.net for several years now with students and it works well. You can restrict students as a group or as individuals. Currently they can only email other students in our district. You could also create a white list of outside accounts for projects. Their filter also works well. -RickM From: School Information Technology Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bjorn Behrendt Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 11:25 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Google Apps Lucie's email reminded me. A classmate of mine showed us gaggle.net. It is safe free email for students. I believe that it can even be set up to work with google apps (for a fee) and do exactly what you want for restricting students, and archiving, and filtering and more. -bj ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lucie deLaBruere" <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 10:52:56 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: Google Apps Good question. We use GAPE with students. I was thinking that creating a separate domain for Faculty and Staff. But then comes the issue of the best way to allow sharing between the two. When we did our first test, we did not allow students to share documents outside the domain. Now we are experimenting with allowng outside sharing. This allows students to share documents with teachers who have their own Google Account. But then again this allows students to set up an excel spreadsheet and use the discuss feature as a CHAT window. or to use a Word document in a similar way. Again... I think that setting expectations about behavior is more important than a technical solution to what your students can and can't do. But its all stuff we are discovering. At the Vita Learn Meeting NW we set up a document to compile what we are learning, and our questions. (sort of creating an internal VT FAQ) If you send me a request off list, then I'll add you to the document. Lucie On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 9:25 AM, Robert Brinkley <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Several weeks ago, Jeff Keltner of Google Enterprise demonstrated Google Apps for K-12 at the VSA meeting at U32 High School. We’ve begun testing Google Apps and I wanted to share some of the issues that have come up. Google Apps includes Google Docs and our teachers are excited about the potential of sharing documents with their students. You can not currently disable GMail for an individual account or for a group of users. That presents a problem for us. Some of our schools do not allow students to have email accounts and when you create a new user in Google Apps, it comes with Gmail. The only way to disable GMail today is for the whole domain, so there is no easy way to disable Gmail for an individual or group of users. Google is working to allow disabling of applications through the groups mechanism that they have, but they do not have that capability today and it is still a few months away. Is there a workaround to be able to share documents with kids using Google Apps but for them not to have a Gmail account? Robert C. Brinkley, Director of Technology North Country Supervisory Union 338 Highland Ave., Suite #4 Newport, VT 05855-4897 Phone (802) 334-5847 ext. 18 Fax (802) 334-5952 -- Lucie deLaBruere www.LearningWithLucie.com www.InfiniteThinking.org http://twitter.com/techsavvygirl Work: 802 527 0565 x 3206 Cell: 802 752 6086 [log in to unmask]