Google Apps for Education is an offering from Google whereby institutions such as ours can sign up to move our E-mail and calendaring activities to Google. We will soon be offering an application through the student electronic portfolio from where students can choose to move their email to Google.
Many of our students already use the email redirect feature to redirect their emails to Google and other free email providers. By offering Google Apps for Education, we are facilitating this move.
Google Apps for Education offers the following benefits and features:
- you will be able to keep your Wesleyan e-mail address and password, which will work with GMail
- 2 GB of email storage
- Calendaring
- Personal webspace
- Web based document and spreadsheet programs
- Collaboration tools for documents and calendaring;
The disadvantages are:
- your email is on an external server, so if the network is down, you cannot access the mail
- Google may at some point in the future not offer this as a free service
- advertisements will appear when you read your email
- you will not be able to use desktop email programs such as Eudora or Outlook under this setup
- the mail servers are not under Wesleyan’s control, and some users may have privacy concerns regarding storing email on external servers. We strongly encourage you to read Google’s privacy statement and security statement before you sign up for this service.
We expect that Google will provide adequate support for our users, but please be aware that if you opt in to Google Apps for Education, support for Google products will come from Google, not ITS. We will continue to provide more detailed information on the sign up page, however, please post comments here if you have any questions in this regard.