Why I’m excited about Google Apps for Education

After several years of consideration and deliberation, Google Apps for Education has been launched throughout the YRDSB. Google Apps is a collection of services including the Google Docs collaborative suite of office applications, 30 GB of Google Drive cloud storage, email, calendaring, website creation, and more. Every student and staff member now has a Google Apps for Education account with the username and password synchronized to their school computer login.
With Google Apps comes many new possibilities:

• Students can collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, drawings, and presentations from any location at any time.
• Teachers can see students’ work as it develops, and give feedback by adding comments.
• Teachers can see which students contribute to a collaborative document by viewing the document’s revision history.
• Documents cannot be forgotten at home or lost on a corrupted USB drive.
• Departments can share a folder of common resources to access them anywhere, and even offline using Google Drive Sync
• All students now have a Google Account, so can use that to easily access services like Khan Academy.
• All students now have an email address under the gapps.yrdsb.ca domain, so they can now enrol services like Prezi’s Enjoy Edu which are free for educational users only.
• Shared calendars which can be added to mobile devices or embedded in Moodle courses can help with communication with departments, classes, clubs, and teams.

What you should do right now

This year, resolve to change your Passwords

My family's online presence started in 1987 when we signed up for the pre-Internet communication provider CompuServe. After dialing in with our modem, we logged in to the service with a nine digit username and a password supplied by CompuServe. Twenty five years later that password is still in use....
I must have hundreds of accounts with passwords on different web sites, and I expect you are the same. Our passwords protect information that ranges in value from inconsequential to critical banking and email details. Wired magazine senior writer Mat Honan discovered first hand this summer how vulnerable our password protected services are when hackers compromised his email accounts and remotely deleted everything on his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. Lacking proper backups, he lost significant personal data including every picture he had ever taken of his 18 month old daughter. Most photos were later retrieved (at considerable expense) by a forensic disk recovery lab, but Honan was left shaken. Reflecting on the incident in December's edition of Wired magazine, he concludes that passwords alone are a flawed way to authenticate identity in a networked world filled with inexpensive and powerful computers. Though it might be a little frightening, I highly recommend reading the full article, or listening to last Friday's interview on Q.
Even if Honan is right that "the age of the password has come to an end," the reality is that we keep using passwords dozens of times a day. We need incorporate practices that give as much protection as possible until more robust authentication methods gain wide-spread use. Here are five things to consider as you decide how to manage your passwords: