Google for students and teachers

Many of our customers have become acquainted with Google applications, such as spreadsheets, throught the use of gWhiz products. Did you know that Google has now revised their terms of service (TOS), specifically to enable students and teachers to use their tools, and assure their privacy and security in the classroom? The Google Apps, Educator Edition is an extremely powerful and easy to use suite of web tools which allows teachers to accomplish important tasks in the classroom. Now with the revised terms of service, an important impediment to the adoption of Google tools for classroom use has been removed. Please see the posting in Google's forum, as copied below:

Changes to Terms of Services, SAS 70 Type II
Thursday, November 6, 2008 4:24 PM
Privacy and data ownership are top discussion points in this forum. Recently, Google has made some changes which should clarify our position.First off, we wanted to point you to our newly revised Terms of Service for Google Apps EDU which should be more precise in several of these areas. Much of the confusion and concern around our Terms of Service revolve around privacy and ownership of data. So, we'd like to be very clear on these two points:* Google does not claim any ownership or your content, and uploading your content into our systems does not change this. We do require certain licenses from you to publicly display or transmit data according to your wishes (eg a public Site or Document), but the content is not ours.* Google treats all data from Google Apps customers as "Confidential Information." We do not share or reveal private user content such as email or personal information with third parties except as required by law, on request by a user or system administrator, or to protect our systems. Unless prohibited by law, we always give our customers notice of such requests.We also wanted to mention that we have extended the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.Last but not least, many schools have told us of the importance of a SAS 70 Type II audit to ensure the safety of their students' and faculties' private information. We're happy to announce that an independent public accounting firm has verified the effectiveness of our technical processes and controls for Google Apps, and Google Apps has satisfactorily completed a SAS 70 Type II audit.As always, we appreciate your feedback as we strive to provide the highest quality of services to our customers. We look forward to the continuing discussion on these points. If you'd like further information on the privacy within Google Apps you can check our FAQ or the Google Privacy Center.

We at gWhiz applaud Google's efforts and accomodation of student's needs for privacy and security when using the internet. Teachers who are interested in how Google applications can be used for teaching can discuss ideas with other teachers in the "Google for Educators Discussion Group" (http://groups.google.com/group/google-for-educators). The ideas are free, and so are Google's tools! For ideas on how to use gWhiz products in the classroom, please visit our Educator's discussion area, (http://forum.gwhizmobile.com/forumdisplay.php?f=37).