In response to an institution staff who asked for a Google app development similar to the RosarioSIS discipline module.
Google apps for education
Don't take me wrong, I think Google apps are great, well integrated and reliable. They're even free for educational institutions. As such, an entire school and each of its students can have access to its email, documents and so on.
Problems
Now, I see 2 major problems: they are managed by Google Inc.
Yes, 2 problems:
- Google is a company based in the USA.
- Your school does not own its data.
To develop a bit:
- You are creating economic growth in the USA, not in your country as you rely on a foreign company.
- You are giving away the data, maybe sensitive information about hundreds of students to a company known to:
- Not respect their users' privacy.
- Give their customers' account access to the NSA, thus contributing to global surveillance.
- Analyse your personal emails and documents in order to sell and show you back advertisement.
As a consequence, the students are also implicitly educated to think it is OK to do or accept the above.
Solutions
We believe free softwares like RosarioSIS are essential for education.
Self-hosting your own cloud and email services is not so hard nowadays using quality solutions like ownCloud or Nextcloud http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-add-email-to-your-nextcloud-server/
This way is not as easy but the reward will be double:
- You will host your school data, securely and respecting the students' privacy.
- This will serve as an example to educate the students about those topics.
We are more than willing to help you integrate RosarioSIS with the above mentioned solutions.
The internet and the web were designed free and open. We can choose which web we want to build, together.
