Last week I was caught flat footed in the tech realm. You see, I am using Google Apps through my classroom domain name to have the kids utilized Docs and Sites and such. It’s AWESOME except that since I have to use standard (they don’t give full education to classroom deployments) I only have 50 user slots available. Not so handy for a teacher that has 120 kids per quarter.

What I was doing was having the kids share a login. That is that I had 30 logins per period, so 4 kids had access to 1 login. Not the best way to go. There was a little bit of abuse unfortunately. Somebody went in and put up some R to X rated stuff on other’s Sites. As it stands, its hard to nail it down to one person since they used 8 different logins. How they got the information, I’ll never know.

So, Sites got shut down. I’m going to try PBWorks and see how well that goes. At least there I can create usernames for the kids and be able to track them that way.

The thing I really have to comment about is that I am extremely annoyed that kids couldn’t possibly handle a little bit of responsibility and went nuts. Even after repeated warnings that I closely monitor the Sites and any malfeasance would result in loss of privileges.

Really, it would be much better if the district would adopt Google Apps. That way user names would work. I know its complicated. I know they don’t want to do it. But, really, the hiccup I ran into was easily removed, and I would have definitely known who to drop the hammer on if they had to use their network logins. Whatever. We’ll see what the AP does.