Google Apps offers a free Education Edition to schools. Schools can provide all of their faculty, staff, and students with a gmail account that uses the school’s domain!

It gets better, Google Apps comes with more than free, reliable, searchable email (with 7GB of storage space!). Your college Google account comes with free IM, free Video Chat, and free Google Documents (this last freebie is a complete online office suite, by the way). I’ll shut-up about how awesome this is for college campuses Google can sell you on Google Apps for Schools better than I can.

I think it would be awesome if SUNY Fredonia switched to Google Apps, and I’ve been asking around campus to see if we’ve considered it. A colleague of mine told me that it would be worth trying to find out if other SUNY schools have made the switch. So, I’ve been digging around for the past couple of hours trying to find one.

I found six! And that colleague found a seventh! SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Binghamton are among them!

Seven SUNY Schools Using Google Apps

1. SUNY Buffalo [Link Here]
2. SUNY Binghamton [Link Here]
3. SUNY OCC [link here]
4. SUNY RCC [link here]
5. SUNY JCC [link here]
6. SUNY IT [link here]
7. SUNY New Paltz [link here]

I suspect with so many SUNY schools making the switch, it will be easier for SUNY Fredonia. We’ll have brother and sister schools to talk to about how the switch went down. We have an opportunity to give our faculty, staff, and students an excellent, free alternative to a  service we’re paying for. But it’s better than a mere alternative – it comes loaded with tons of productivity apps (including a complete office suite!) that will make the educational environment for our students better.

Heck, Los Angeles just switched to Google Apps. If the city of Los Angeles can do it, and 7 other SUNY schools can do it – so can we.

If anyone has any information on other SUNY schools making the switch to Google Apps, let me know.