The State of Colorado Puts Innovation First

Posted by Kristin D. Russell, Secretary of Technology and State Chief Information Officer, Governor’s Office of Information Technology, State of Colorado

Editor's note: Colorado has enticed all sorts of pioneers since its Wild West beginnings. We’re excited to highlight a handful of these trailblazers - the intrepid entrepreneurs, aspiring micro-brewers and ambitious thought leaders - who have helped create the adventurous and innovative culture the Centennial State is known for. Today, we hear from Kristin D. Russell, Secretary of Technology and State Chief Information Officer for the State of Colorado’s Office of Information Technology.

The Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is leading an effort to transform government through the use of shared information technology services. As we shift from “business as usual” processes and tools towards innovative solutions that enable the efficient, effective, and elegant delivery of services, we look more and more to cloud-based services and solutions. In fact, we have published a “Cloud First” strategy for Colorado.

The move to Google Apps for Government in Colorado allowed us to replace our 15 siloed and disparate email systems, and the 50 servers supporting them, into a single, cloud-based solution. Now, not only do our more than 26,000 employees have a common email, calendar and collaboration system, they have the ability to work together on Google Docs, allowing teams to work together and share information across departments. This accessibility has also helped to enable a BYOD (bring your own device) program that lets employees work the way they want to work – even when they’re not sitting at their desks.

We are also taking advantage of Google Sites. Since Google Sites doesn’t require extensive web development skills, state agencies are now empowered to create helpful resources, both internally and externally, for a number of programs. TobaccoFreeCO.org, for example, was built on Google Sites and provides information on the effects of second-hand smoke and resources on quitting smoking. When unprecedented flooding devasted many areas of Colorado in recent months, we built a Google Map to help organize recovery efforts and then set up the ColoradoUnited.com website to provide the latest updates and provide an interactive way to assist flood victims as they rebuild.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper often talks about the “three E’s” – making government more efficient, effective, and elegant. In Colorado we in the Governor’s Office of Information Technology are in the business of using innovative technology to accomplish just that.

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Google Apps for Education helps Pt England School raise achievement levels

Posted by Dorothy Burt, professional development leader at Pt England School

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Dorothy Burt, a professional development leader at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand. Dorothy has been a Google Certified Teacher since 2008.

Here at Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand our motto is “Strive to succeed.” But in our low socioeconomic area – an impoverished suburb surrounded by affluence – there’s an unspoken belief that success can be associated with your ability to get out of this part of town. 90% of our 600 students are of Maori or Pasifika descent, who are often found in the lowest achieving cohort. Raising student achievement levels for this demographic is a government priority – and a continued focus for the principal, management team, teachers and parent community at Pt England school. Recognizing our students’ natural flair for technology and expressing themselves through digital platforms, we began a journey to get our students excited about learning and improve their achievement levels through collaborative e-learning. We haven’t looked back since.

We migrated to Google Apps for Education in 2008. After training our teaching staff, we quickly began to see the advantages of working collaboratively. Our migration coincided with several neighbouring schools joining together to form the Manaiakalani Cluster – a group that works toward raising student achievement in literacy. Using Google Apps and other tools, we sought to create confident and informed digital citizens. While we quickly noticed increased student engagement, teachers felt that there was still a missing piece. Enter the Teacher Dashboard, an add-on from the Google Apps Marketplace that allowed teachers to get a bird’s-eye view of classroom activity across Docs, Sites, Gmail, Blogger and Picasa. Using Google Sites, the Manaiakalani Cluster manages the student learning environment internally, making the feedback exchange quick and easy.

The research from test scores collated in 2011 showed significant progress in literacy. Surveys, video observations and interviews with students now demonstrate a group of young learners who are highly engaged in learning.



They have a renewed sense of pride because their test scores improved, and – more importantly to them – people all around the world were reading their blog posts and complementing their success. The teachers also feel a renewed sense of engagement with their classrooms since they can centrally track and monitor student progress via the Teacher Dashboard.

Using Google tools has provided our students with equal access to learning opportunities and opened the door for them to be excited about the learning process and share their progress with the world. As a result, these students know that they don’t need to leave their town to be successful; the world now comes to them and shows them that they are.

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Live webinar: Accessibility Updates for Docs, Sites and Calendar

Posted by Naomi Black, Technical Program Manager, Accessibility

Earlier this year, members of the blind community shared a powerful message with us about the importance of accessibility. On the Official Google Blog today, we announced some accessibility enhancements to our products, including new keyboard shortcuts and improved screen reader support in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. For blind students and employees who rely on assistive technologies to access the web, we hope these improvements will make it easier to use our products.

To answer your questions and discuss how today’s product updates affect blind users in businesses, governments and schools using Google Apps, we’d like to invite our enterprise customers to join us for a webinar on September 21.

Accessibility Updates for Docs, Sites and Calendar
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
12:00pm-1:00pm PT
Sign up here

To learn more about accessibility features in Google Apps, please visit our help center. For information more generally about using Google products with screen readers, how to send us feedback and how to track our progress, visit google.com/accessibility.

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Better control in Google Sites with page-level permissions

Posted by Eric Zhang, Software Engineer



(Cross-posted from the Google Docs Blog.)



Today we’re introducing page-level permissions, a new feature that will allow you to control who can view and edit your Google Site on a page by page basis.



Using page-level permissions, you can make some pages private for certain users while keeping other pages public for everyone to see. For instance, let’s say you have a Google Site that you’ve shared with your team and your manager. You can allow your team to see one set of pages, let your manager edit another set of pages, and keep yet another set of pages private for only you.



Only site owners have the ability to enable this feature, which is turned off by default for new and existing sites. To turn on page-level permissions, go to More Actions > Sharing and Permissions.





From there, click Enable page-level permissions. Then, in the dialog box, click Turn on page-level permissions.





Once page-level permissions is enabled, you’ll have three options to choose from:

• allow a page to inherit all of your site-level permissions
• elect to include future site-level changes to a page
• prevent a page from inheriting any future changes made at the site-level

Using page-level permissions should give you greater control over who can edit and access your Google site. To learn more about setting page-level permissions, take a look at our getting started guide. Let us know what you think in our support forums.

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