The Piedmont Unified School District created new Gmail accounts for PMS and PHS students, for better communication with their teachers and a more modern learning experience.

Beach Elementary School computer teacher Stephanie Griffin is in charge of the Gmail accounts and has been working on the project for two years. The idea was first presented when teachers got their Gmail accounts, she said.

“Once we saw the power of the collaboration tools in GoogleApps, the need for 24/7 access to learning became so important, and how easy it can be to setup the accounts, it was clear they would be a big benefit to learning in Piedmont,” Griffin said.

PUSD piloted the program last year at PMS and in some PHS classes, and the email accounts proved to be a useful tool, history teacher Dave Keller said. Keller helped pilot the program last year and is planning on using it with his modern world history and civics classes this year.

“Last year students were able to type up their work and put it in their folder, and they didn’t have to bring their work in to class, they didn’t have to print it out, or anything. I could just pull it up and take a look at it and grade it. That’s mainly the way that I used it, to allow students to do work at home, and not have to worry about bringing it to class.” Keller said, “The Gmail accounts are helpful because they allow teachers to look at documents that students create in their Google docs folders.”

Just like regular Gmail, the new accounts will offer email, Google Docs, spreadsheets, and calendars, but they are owned and set up by PUSD.

“My seniors do presentations to the class, and the Google suite has presentation capability, so they’ll create presentations at home and it’s automatically saved when they get to school,” Keller said.

Most of Keller’s written work will be done on Google docs, which is very similar to turnitin.com, a tool already used by many teachers.

“Turnitin has a lot of capability that these Google docs don’t have,” he said, “Turnitin allows teachers to comment in a special way, they can leave voice comments, they can do a lot of things the Google docs can’t.”

However, the one important thing that Google docs allows that turnitin.com does not is the sharing capability.

“This year, there is going to be a lot of collaboration that students are going to be doing in their Google documents folder, and that’s not something that turnitin.com would allow them to do,” Keller said.

However, the content on the Gmail accounts will be screened by PUSD, so students should not put any personal information on their account, Keller said.

Despite the many benefits the accounts offer, students seem to be frustrated with them, Keller said.

“I think from the students perspective, it’s going to be really difficult getting into the habit of checking an account that’s not your personal account, and what’s going to promote that problem is the students are not going to be able to email anyone outside the school. They are only going to be able to email themselves and anyone who has a PUSD account,” he said, “And so I think that’s going to be something that’s a little frustrating.”

Junior Ryan Nakamura does not think the Gmail accounts are necessary because he already has another email, he said.

“Everyone has their own email account that they use for sports or work,” he said, “I think [teachers] should just ask for everyone’s email.”

Griffin, however, thinks otherwise.

“The school stands to gain immensely with the accounts,” Griffin said, “It’s easy for teachers and staff to communicate to students, reduce paper consumption, foster collaborative learning and implement 21st century projects.”

In the future, they are hoping to extend the Gmail accounts to the elementary schools, Griffin said. Students will be able to keep their account throughout their career in Piedmont and use the storage space as a portfolio of their learning, she said.

“I think it’s in the long run, going to be really great, though we may have some growing pains at first,” Keller said, “It will be beneficial, especially in the sense that the whole world is going in that direction, in terms of the way that we communicate and store information, and organize information, so its better that we can jump in and start learning it now, before it changes so much that we have just missed the boat.”