Google Admitted To Colorado, Iowa Schools

Google on Monday said that two more states have given the green light for interested school districts to begin using the company's Web-based applications.

Following Oregon's decision in April to allow its school districts to deploy Google Apps for Education, Colorado and Iowa have agreed to make Google Apps available to over 3,000 schools in the two states.

Google Apps for Education includes Gmail, Docs, Sites, Calendar, Video, and Groups.

While adoption of Google Apps for Education is optional, the service appears to be popular among public school districts in Oregon. Two months ago, Steve Nelson, technology director of Oregon Virtual Schools, said he expected that about 50% of Oregon's almost 200 public school districts would sign up to use Google's online applications in the following 12 months.

Google also said that it is introducing a suite of training solutions and a new online Google Apps Education Training Center to help educators understand Google Apps better.

In addition, Google said that it is extending its promotional security offering to primary and secondary schools. The promotion, which provides free Google Message Security e-mail filtering, was introduced last summer and was scheduled to conclude next month. It will now continue to be available through the end of the year.

On Friday, Google said that it had completed moving its encrypted search service from https://www.google.com to https://encrypted.google.com. The move, announced two weeks ago, was undertaken to allow school administrators to block the use of encrypted search, without interfering with other Google authenticated services.

The company said it is looking into ways to allow encrypted search back on Google.com without compromising school administrators' oversight capabilities.