I love the idea of Google Apps – the collaboration, the portability, the platform independent tools and so on. Even though we are a special school I jumped on the bandwagon and signed up for the education edition. I’ve experimented with Google Apps with my pupils, where their literacy allows.
This evening I came across a tweet from @mrstucke asking “To monitor sites in GApps domain goto list of your sites http://bit.ly/8sn8if click ‘browse sites within…’ – does this show all sites?“. I decided to check.
Because we don’t use Google Apps extensively, I didn’t separate staff and pupil accounts. The same restrictive email filtering rules are applied to all non-admin accounts, and Google sites are permitted to be shared outside of the domain. I have used Google Sites to post links, resources and even to share planning with another school.
I have recently been using Google sites with year 10/11 pupils who have been building basic sites in Entry level ICT. As part of the creation process I asked them to enter “classX” in the categories field (it makes it easier for a teacher to find them later) and I asked them to make sure that the “let anyone in the world view this site” box was unticked as below.
I had always assumed it would be easy to check which sites are public and which are not. It wasn’t until I checked this evening that I discovered it isn’t as obvious as it should be. I’m sure that any school or business admin would like to see which information is being shared outside the domain – since this could easily happen accidentally.
When you enter Google sites you are presented with a list of your own sites. Next to each site it helpfully shows the categories (entered above), who the site is shared with, and the site description. So far so good.
Then you browse sites within your domain and you get to see the categories that come up (you can see we haven’t been too careful with category names and some pupils even have used their names).
When you click on a category you get a list of sites within that category showing the sharing status of each.
The list above shows the first attempts of my entry level group. You can now see that they are all shared within the domain (my preferred option for a special school) but not outside of the domain.
So what can we learn from this?
- Disable sharing outside of the domain unless you know need this functionality.
- Make sure pupils are aware of the sharing status of their own site.
- Have all pupils tag their Google site with a class or even site-wide tag so make monitoring easy
Google – you need to add an easy way of checking if any of your employees are leaking company information by mistake!