Chrome will bring about the ICT revolution in schools

>>How do you think the Google Apps accounts are going to be setup? Google isn't some magical beast that telepathically knows all the students in a school.

Haha, I know they are not. I am saying that often school IT departments are underfunded and understaffed and would be relieved to have people that are more capable handeling it for them. Our It head was also a gym teacher.

>>When you manage services locally - i.e. desktop/laptops with directory services, file&print, email handled internally, YOU (that is, IT) decides what users can do. They can stop users from installing random Apps, or visitng porn/non-educational sites, and do things like prevent students from printing war and peace fifty times just for giggles.

Well apps are a nonissue since it is chromeos, and only has one app. I thought I had heard of filtering options for enterprise/education customers but I can't find the article saying so. Acting on the assumption that it would be filterable, are there any other objections

>>Sounds like your school needs new IT staff, not an external provider. Incompetent staff will f*ck up anything they're given.

Completely agreed, as I said the head was also the gym teacher. I am sure everyone would love to have a better system in place, but it is not economically viable on he budget given. The relative low entry cost and high uptime of google services would certainly be an option though. But how is new it staff !== external provider?

>>Google isn't going to send staff out to your school to create/manage the accounts etc. Someone will still need to do that.

They have api's and forms to easily create this. Its must cheaper than rewriting your own system.

>>So lets say you can use an authenticated proxy to log that - you then need to have an authentication system for the proxy server. So now you have a list of students, staff, etc in your local LDAP (i.e. AD/eDirectory/etc) and a mirrored list in Google Apps so they can use that. But then you have to explain to the users that the passwords aren't in sync, and that if they want to change their proxy password you have to provide some kind of web interface for them, because they aren't authenticating the device via Directory Services, which provides a password-change/password expired/etc mechanism for desktop OS'.

I know I asked you to extrapolate on an assumption, but I can't image a chromeos implementation requiring an LDAP server for this sort of work. Simply hardcoding a list of blocked sites and IPs into any non-admins account would be fairly trivial to implement. But yes I agree, if you did this by means of a complicated solution it would be complicated.

>>If you hire IT staff and then tell them they are there to "support" Google Apps/Gmail, if they are any good they will politely tell you to stick your job. If they want to stay, you don't really want them.

The point is the complete reduction/need for a full time IT person. Google also offers 24/7 phone support for all education and corporate subscribers. A "computer guy" and these services would work fine for a majority of people.

Ultimately, is this a silver bullet for all schools? No. But Silver bullets don't exist. This is something that takes a lot of load and setup/maintenance from the schools. And in the end I fail to see how this could be anything but a positive thing.