Google at School

I know a very little bit about cloud computing. So I am hoping for some help here.

If Google offers mail, documents (word processing, spreadsheet), web pages, blogging tools, collaboration tools for free, why would anyone try to do these things in house?

I can see keeping sensitive data a little more secure by using server space that you pay to have secure. But how much of student work is really that sensitive?

I can see an advantage to someone else running the servers that hold the student work, run e-mail, host web pages... the price is right.

Has up-time been a problem? I have only heard of one time that G-Mail went down for maybe two hours. Is there more that I am not hearing about? I think that would be an amazing record for anyone and I am very amazed when I think of the number of users.

I know our IT staff is about one download away from being very seriously overworked. Is this something that would help us farm some things out?

Google Groups

http://groups.google.com/?hl=en

Our school has some flexible staff development time built into the calendar. Last year, someone came up with the great idea of using some of that time as a book club. Read the book, discuss at someone's home, take care of that flex time.

The discuss at someone's home was frequently a discomfort for me. I have to get a kid out the door for summer school and I'm the daycare provider in the summer. I hate to clean my own house spouse-approved-for-company clean.

I suggested that I host this summer at Google Groups.

Read the book, stop in for the online discussion when you have a minute and I don't have to sterilize the house to host!