Why GAT Labs Was a Great Eye-Opener for the American International School of Muscat
About the School
The American International School of Muscat (TAISM) is an over 20-year-old school in Muscat, Oman. Its goal is to provide students from pre-kindergarten to high school with a holistic education, promoting ethical, responsible, and globally conscious academic attitudes.
TAISM is the only international school that follows the American curriculum in Muscat. They use Google Workspace for Education Plus license. The school is developing a position in the regional education community by attending the NESA Leadership Conference and other networking events.
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About the IT Team
Gokul Krishnan, as a Technology Director at the TAISM, is responsible for creating school policies and leading the implementation and development of technology in collaboration with the School Director. This is his second job in the educational environment; he previously worked at an American Embassy School in New Delhi, India.
In addition to Gokul, the IT team consists of three people: an Information Assistant, an IT Assistant (Help Desk Technician), and an IT Infrastructure Specialist.
The Challenges They Faced Before GAT
Before implementing GAT, the IT Team struggled to get a comprehensive look into the Google Workspace for Education environment. They were using only GAM, whose features didn’t provide deep insights, such as tracking data ownership and secure file sharing, at that time.
Additionally, this tool required too much time for the back-end work and couldn’t be used on any device without installation. Moreover, GAM didn’t provide a graphic overview of the entire domain.
It was when the school decided to transition from a 1:1 iPad model to a mixed device environment of iPads and Chromebooks. Gokul started looking for a solution to monitor data security, simplify user and file management, and track shared files across the complex Google domain.
While GAM was no longer enough to meet the school’s needs, Gokul heard about GAT Suite for Education from Dr. Greg Clinton from the American International School of Chennai. He highly recommended this toolset to manage Chromebooks in the school domain.
How GAT Labs Impacted This School Domain Management
Gokul really appreciated the move to a more powerful and user-friendly dashboard that allows him to see what’s currently happening across the Google domain.
“I love having this flexibility of a graphical user interface and in-depth insights on users and classrooms, which GAT+ gives. That helps us easily visualize and manage our digital landscape.”
Now, they don’t have to spend as much time coding as they did when using GAM exclusively. This has also reduced the burden on the Technology Director. When they need an overview of the domain, the IT team isn’t limited to Gokul’s laptop; they can use the GAT tools anywhere and on any device.
Streamlined User Offboarding/Onboarding Management
When a teacher left the TAISM after more than 15 years of working there, the IT team realized she left huge amounts of files on her account. With GAT+, they could identify all her data and manage files properly, organizing and easily changing their ownership.
GAT+ simplifies user and data management when a teacher or student leaves the school. It provides valuable support in the onboarding process, especially in terms of changing file and folder ownership or removing users from groups and classrooms.
Enhanced the School Domain Insights Visibility and Reporting
With the GAT+ auditing functionalities, Gokul is able to find and extract in-depth outputs on the school domain and report them to the leadership team. For example, he can view how the files are being exposed to external users outside the domain and track them, which wasn’t possible prior to GAT.
Based on that data, the principal can make better decisions to increase student academic performance, improve classroom management, and strengthen cybersecurity and data privacy at school.
How the Gokul’s Work Changed with GAT Labs
The GAT toolset has transformed Google domain management at TAISM, making it much easier than a few years ago. Detailed information GAT provides in real-time allows for proactive actions to control school data security.
Gokul admitted that using GAT reduced their workload:
“It’s a real time saver for us looking back at how much work we did manually using GAM. We really like having the graphical interface instead of typing commands to do a quick email search or file owner search. Once you start using all these options, you see how beneficial they are and don’t want to lose that.”
They have already started the data cleanup in the entire domain, which will be finished in 2025. GAT helps them streamline this process, especially by identifying suspended users and their data easily.
GAT’s Benefits for the Education Digital Environment
TAISM’s Technology Director believes every school using Google Workspace for Education should have a tool like GAT in addition to Google’s Admin Console. GAT streamlines managing users, data, and Drives as well as implementing cybersecurity measures.
Moreover, it provides customizable, easy-to-access features so admins don’t waste time coding or investigating how to deal with the problem.
For Gokul, the decision to continue with GAT is clear:
“With GAT Labs, how we organize data within our Google domain has become easier, which impacts us operationally. GAT was a big eye-opener for us. It allows us to see where our data is, how people are using it, and we understand our data’s whole life cycle better”.
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