G-Mail? E-Mail? MX What? Accounts?

I have successfully set up g-mail accounts that I can mail FROM, but not TO. Apparently, this will require configuration through the domain name service provider, which is not an account I have access to at this time.

In my first "background" post, I mentioned a question about MX records, since that's how we can set up the e-mail to come in. I appreciated the response posted, but was limited by my access to the provider control panel. It SHOULD be easy, right?

While I do have admin access to the Google part of our domain, I don't have access to the control panel through our provider. I sent the following link to our district admin, with the hope that he'll be able to set up whatever it is that needs to be done: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33352

So why do we need to have g-mail access if we already have our district e-mail? Well, at this point, I don't want the pilot group,  including me, to be limited as we explore how we're going to get our Google Apps implemented. We may decide later that we can use our non-gmail accounts successfully, but my experience with Google Apps is that it's much more complicated to use other e-mails to access them.

At this point, we also don't have district permission to set up student accounts. Our district admins are consulting with legal about how we can best handle this.

In researching, I saw a permission letter to parents where a teacher had set up student accounts, but not e-mail accounts, for her students.  I will be interested in seeing if that's a viable option for us, if we can't do the e-mail.

The district near us did a complete Google Apps implementation, including e-mail. It was wonderful, as a parent, to watch my daughter sign on to her G-mail account, pull up a form posted by her teacher, and then follow a link to a video posted by the teacher about the topic taught in class that morning. She was then expected to comment on the video, which gave the teacher a record of her watching it, along with a time-stamp of the comment. Beautiful!  No more "That's not how my teacher taught it!" arguments at home, because we could see together exactly how the teacher taught the concept. No excuses from the student that she did the work but didn't remember to bring it, because there was a date/time stamp for the comment, and if the student didn't actually watch, it was her responsibility, not the teacher's.  I envision those options as  "down the line" goals, and certainly understand that the teacher has been piloting the options for her district, too.

I am looking forward to adding more users in the future. Here's the link for requesting more user accounts, so I will store it here for future access.
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1625803


Hmmm... next steps?