What is School 2.0?
School 2.0 is a brainstorming tool designed to help schools, districts and communities develop a common education vision for the future and to explore how that vision can be supported by technology. School 2.0 provides a "big picture" perspective that allows for a common point of entry so that all community stakeholders can participate in this important conversation.

While School 2.0 depicts a variety of educational and management scenarios that utilize technology, the examples, information and ideas included are designed to serve as prompts for discussion and should not be construed as a recommendation of any particular technology or scenario. Rather, School 2.0 is purposely a sketch and a work in progress. It is designed to facilitate community discussions and preparations for short and long term educational and management goals.

The effects of developments in information technology described by Moore's Law have already been significant in schools. However, in the next few years, ongoing doublings in the power of digital information technology will lead to schools being fundamentally altered by computers. Instead of being at the periphery of the education process, computers will be centrally involved in almost all aspects of teaching and learning.

MIT's $100 laptop is perhaps the clearest sign that things are about to change in a big way. Another sign is Apple's inclusion of a built-in video camera in all their new laptops. Google's providing a free version of SketchUp is a third. The ongoing rapid development of Moodle a fourth. Second Life a fifth. Then there are wikis, blogs, MySpace, webcasts, Google Earth, Google News, Google Maps, iChat AV, Marritech, Skype, Elgg, Garage Band... I'm sure you could add many more without much effort.

Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school's logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems &mdash and it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.