Green Dot Public Schools is a non-profit organization founded in 2000 to help transform public education in historically underserved communities in the USA.

The U.S. Department of Education considers Green Dot to be a national leader in school turnarounds, and they are the only charter school operator to lead the successful turnaround of a 3,000-plus student high school.

They have been using our Google Apps plugins for WordPress for a few months now, and reported to be very happy with them! We caught up with Rena Banka, IT Project Manager at Green Dot, for a short interview to find out how they are using our plugins to integrate Google Apps and WordPress.

How are you using Google Drive Embedder?

We are using the Google Drive Embedder on our Knowledge Sharing Platform. As a charter management organization with 3 regions, 26 schools, and over 1,000 employees we are constantly sharing information that changes from year to year. Previously our technology team would receive documents from content owners and upload them directly onto our knowledge sharing site. With the Google Drive Embedder, we are able to remove this time-consuming step and put the responsibility of the content upload on the content owner.

Now, each of our curriculum coaches has access to a Google Drive Folder which they can manage on a day-to-day basis without having to contact our technology department to make a change every time. Not only are we able to shift this responsibility, but we are able to maintain the look and feel of our site on the front end without having to worry about the content owner editing pages.

What were your concerns when you first decided to integrate Drive into WordPress somehow?

We were unsure of how protected our content would be using the Google Drive Embedder. Once we figured out there was another plugin that works alongside the Drive plugin (called Google Apps Login), we were able to make sure our Knowledge Sharing Platform was locked down to only our users who could easily authenticate in via their Green Dot Google email address.

What is the most exciting feature of the plugin in your opinion…?

We love the fact that the plugin is real time. It is so exciting to see how quickly the page is updated on its own when new content is loaded, updated, or removed!

Thanks Rena! You can find out more about the great work carried out by Green Dot on their website: greendot.org