7 opportunities: GoogleApps and school librarians

As we roll out GoogleApps for Education to our students this fall, I am just thinking about the implications for our school librarians. Off the top of my head, seven opportunities "MAPS Apps" present to us include:

1. This is our chance to be staff development gurus - again! It's a great chance not only to teach F2F at staff development sessions, but serve as role models: sharing documents, collaborating, and using these tools as teachers. You don't need to know much to be the expert in your school on GoogleApps for education. And such a reputation is gold.
2. We can teach students these tools as part of our IT/IL curriculum, using them for activities we would have used Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for in the past. We can accept responsibility for helping students use these resources safely and responsibly.
3. We can create templates and tools to help students during the research process. (I suspect Apps may be less cumbersome than managing wikis, blogs, etc. for project-long documentation.)
4. We can be the "go-to" support for students for one-on-one help with the apps including using Docs for file storage/portfolios, sharing documents for viewing and editing, using collaboration techniques, finding, making and sharing templates and solving any log-on/access problems.
5. We can use the tools for our own library information gathering efforts - conducting surveys, tracking classes (via calendar), and organizing data.
6. We can use e-mail, Groups and chat for communication with staff and students - information in real time rather than just newsletters.
7. We can use GoogleDocs for curriculum writing, lesson planning, and collaboration with teachers. We can use (and model) self-made video tutorials shared via GoogleVideo. We can create and use templates to share with our fellow librarians and teachers.

We can model a shift to a paperless, social, ubiquitous learning environment where doing stuff takes precedence over learning how to do stuff.

If we don't, who will.

Any good templates out there that you've created that your library PLN ought to know about? Looks like there are some worth exploring right now. A screen shot of a simple template search on "library":