Google Apps are now available to Placer High School students and faculty as part of Placer going paperless.

The modern world is changing every year at a very high rate, and Placer High School will not be left behind in the twenty-first century. This school year is unique in that Placer is making a jump toward the future by taking advantage of Google Apps.

“Google Apps is a suite of web apps powered by Google: mail, calendar, docs, sites. [The] power is that all the apps are interconnected and you can share and collaborate,” stated Greg Ramseth, Director of Technology and Assessment for the Placer Union High School District.

With Google Apps, students and teachers will have access to an email service using a special form of Gmail, Google’s email client. They will also have access to Google Docs, a productivity suite that allows users to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings. Users can also take advantage of a calendar program and a website building tool, both from Google. Best of all, Google Apps is a free tool to help with student and teacher productivity.

Users can access all of these tools on any computer no matter what operating system it is, as long as they have access to the Internet. In a world where money can be hard to come by this allows money to be saved by families; they do not need to pay for software like Microsoft Office, which retails for one hundred and twenty dollars at Best Buy.

This is all in an effort for Placer to become a paperless school and help cut paper usage as much as possible. It allows a student or teacher to be working on a document or preparing a presentation at school using Google Apps to save it on their Google account, then open it up at home on another computer and continue working right where they left off. There is no need for a flash drive or to print out their work until they are absolutely finished.

The only problem that surfaces with Google Apps is that some students are unsure of how to use these programs.

“It will be two years for the full potential, hopefully spring. [Students are] still learning how to use [Google Apps],” responded Ramseth about the possibilities and the timetable as to when it will be in full effect.

The Yearbook and Hillmen Messenger staffs both use these tools to allow group collaboration and communication while not all in the same room. Emails can be sent out by one student and that message can be sent to the rest of the staff to help get work done in a productive way.

Students and faculty can use this software by going to the Placer High School website and clicking on the link in the middle of the page or by entering the following into their address bar: www.google.com/a/puhsd.us.

Placer is not the first or the only school to be using this software; multiple school districts around the nation use Google Apps. A handful of colleges use the tools as well, including Northwestern University, Arizona State University, University of Southern California and the University of Notre Dame just to name a few. Not only is this software used by education professionals but also by large corporations and government agencies.

One of the main groups lobbying for Google Apps has been the parents of students, according to Ramseth. When a student is enrolled in college they receive programs for productivity and that type of software has been wanted at the high school level and is now available.

“We’re not under the impression that students will use it to communicate like texting, but for student work,” said Ramseth.

This is all in an effort to move Placer and all the schools in the district to a paperless school environment.