Google Apps Education Edition vs. Google Tools and Products

Google Apps for Education

Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication and collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Docs (online document, spreadsheet, presentation, form creation and sharing), Google Video (secure and private video sharing – 10GB free) and Google Sites (team website creation with videos, images, gadgets and documents integration), as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.

Updated: Google Apps for Education now includes ALL Google products but you can turn those features ON or OFF in your admin dashboard. These extra features are NOT supported under your Google Apps agreement with Google (yet).

A 'hosted' solution means that Google provides all the servers and back-end work, but the services all exist within your school domain. For example, all of your email accounts will have your school domain (@myschool.org), not a Google or Gmail domain (@gmail.com).

Google Apps Education Edition includes these tools:

Communication

Gmail: 7.3 GBs ( and counting) of email storage and search tools that help your school find information fast and instant messaging from right inside your inbox. Video tutorial

Google Calendar: Educators and students can organize their schedules and share events and calendars with others. Video tutorial

Google Talk: Educators and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free anytime, anywhere in the world. Video tutorial

Collaboration

Google Docs: Share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Collaborate in real-time with your team or with your whole school. You can publish final documents to the entire world, too. Video tutorial

Google Sites: Work together to keep related documents, web content and other information in one place, on one site. Video tutorial

Google Video for education: A video hosting and sharing solution that enables schools and other organizations to use video as an effective medium for internal communication and collaboration. 10 GB included free for every school domain. Demo Video

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/demos.html

Other ideas on how to use Google Apps in your school:

What schools who have registered for their own domain have done is to create their own AUP consent form, sent home to parents, and returned to indicate they accept (or not) their child (under 13) using Google Apps.
Sample AUP
Custom start page