Oregon Public Schools adopt GoogleApps

Just announced today by the Oregon Virtual School District:

State Schools Superintendent Susan Castillo announced today that Oregon is the first state in the nation to sign up for Google Apps for Education in K-12 classrooms. Google Apps are available for free to Oregon public schools on a voluntary basis and are designed to help schools improve digital literacy and reduce IT costs while maintaining the security of school and student data.

The website includes the Oregon Google Apps agreement (PDF). Now every school child in Oregon will have the potential to develop a digital archive of their work (in GoogleDocs) and a presentation portfolio (in either GoogleDocs or Google Sites). This is a very interesting development. Here are some articles about this development:

• Official Google Blog
• Mashable: Why Schools are Turning to Google Apps
  1) It saves schools money;
  2) It boosts academic performance and motivation, and;
  3) It prepares students for digital communication in the real world.
  (The article talks about keeping a running e-portfolio of classroom projects with Google Sites).
• TMCNet Educational Technology News
• ZDNet Education
• ReadWriteWeb
• Yahoo News
• Information Week Government

Hopefully Oregon will be the first of many states to make it easy for schools to adopt this tool, not only for GMail, but also as a powerful tool to support learning. Very enlightened approach! The concept of Lifetime Personal Webspace is becoming more of a reality!