Google Apps for Education - GAFE
Are we a GAFE School?
I get asked this quite a bit. The answer is "YES WE ARE!" GAFE stands for Google Apps for Education. All of students have student email accounts through google that we commonly refer to as stumail accounts. This accounts allows students access to a core suite of productivity applications that Google offers to schools for our favorite price: free! These communication and collaboration apps include Stumail, Calendar, Drive, Sites and many others. The best part of GAFE is that it is completely cloud based and floating around the ether of the internet. All we need is a connection to access it.
A few caveats to being a GAFE school... We do not utilize all aspects of GAFE. Within our set up we have disables a few features like hangouts, google+, etc. With that said, many students have set up personal accounts and use those to enable those features. Several people have asked about Google Classroom. This is the new learning management system from google. We do not use it as CANVAS is our LMS and has many more features.
Why don't I have a Stumail Account?
The school has set up accounts for all teachers as well if you would like to use it for communicating, collaborating, and connecting with your kids. To access simply go to www.google.com and in the upper righthand corner you will see the LOG IN button. Your username is your school login with stumail after the @symbol followed by the typical zcs.k12.in.us. For example, Sally Smith would be ssmith@stumail.zcs.k12.in.us. The password to log in the first time is Eagles2015. I would recommend that you change your password once you have logged in.