Since the 2010-2011 school year kicked off, many students have been noticing changes made across the campus. From the building renovations to new initiatives to service change, Howard has been taking steps to improve itself in order to appease students and become more self-efficient. One major step the university has taken is introducing the university to Google Apps.
Courtney Hart, senior finance major, serves as a student ambassador for Google and works with alum, Jewel Burks, to promote the products to the university.
"Google Apps is essentially a way for students to connect with the core products of Google like Gmail, calendar, groups and docs, in an academic setting," said Hart. "Imagine working on a class presentation and all group members are able to edit it at the same time from different computers. That's possible with Google docs."
The efforts of Hart and Burks have given the university an idea of how the applications work and ways they can be implemented campus wide. The department of Information Systems and Services (ISAS) has started a pilot program using Google Apps in the school of business.
The first area that the university is changing is the Howard email address. The current address domain has 2GB of memory, versus the 7GB that a Gmail account would provide. The Gmail accounts also come at no cost to the university. The new student email address domain will be student_name@bison.howard.edu and students must begin to transfer their mail from their current emails to the new ones before October 1, 2010.
As the University continues to make changes to campus technology, students are delighted about the changes they have already seen.
Chanel Oldham, senior accounting major, is excited about these developments. "I hardly ever checked my Howard email because of the website and mailbox not being as accessible, but I think now it should be more interesting," said Oldham. "I wish they started this earlier on. I would have liked to use this information before my senior year."
Howard is not the first University to use Google Apps. Northwester, Arizona State, and the University of Notre Dame are a few of many colleges that also use the free Google applications. Howard has adopted the Gmail accounts, calendar, docs, sites, chat and groups for students.
With the new email addresses, the student login will remain the same and the password will be the student ID number with ‘@' sign. Students can use the login with all of the following sites.
Email - http://mail.bison.howard.edu
Calendar - http://calendar.bison.howard.edu
Docs - http://docs.bison.howard.edu
Chat - download Google Talk client
Sites - http://sites.bison.howard.edu
Groups - http://groups.bison.howard.edu
For more information on how to access the applications and if you have further questions contact googleapps@howard.edu or call the ilab help desk at 202-806-0660.
is a member of the 
