Saturday, June 11, 2011

Transition Process Complete

Several posts later, we finally get to enjoy the fruits of going through the painful transistion process with our Google Apps accounts.  We have apps like Blogger and Picasa inside our school Google Apps Domain and everyone is good to go.

Except.
There is one more step with the student individual blogs. Up until now the students from each class have been sharing a generic login to author their own blogs 
eg. room29@ptengland.school.nz

So the class teacher (who is Admin for all the individual student accounts) had to go into each blog from her Blogger Dashboard and choose Settings > Permissions >
then send an invite to the student using their personal Google Apps email address and invite them to be an author of their own blog.

This seems pretty straight forward:
The students receive an email in their gmail inbox, they click on the link which takes them to Blogger, they follow the instructions and, hey presto!  They can now sign in as themselves when they post to their own blog.

Well it should be that easy, but unfortunately the links to make that happen on two screens in the process are quite small and the text on those pages which catch the eye lead the student to start setting up a new blog.  So we made this next movie to remind the teachers and kids what to do.  They say it has been helpful....



Now all this is behind us.
Our students sign in to their own Google Apps account.
They can acess their Docs, their mail, their Blog, their Sites, their Picasa account, their Maps - all through a single sign-on process.

The good news is that for the schools in our cluster who only joined up to Google Apps this year, they did not have to go through this process at all.  Their accounts are already in the new Google Apps environment.

Hope publishing this learning curve has been of use to others who are going through it.

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