Gmail+ email creation

Today I came across an interesting problem – how can you easily set up a class with their own email addresses if you DON’T have Google Apps for Education for your school? This is not something I’d considered, as Google Apps is free for education and is so amazingly easy to implement and use. However there are situations in which this is necessary, for example: a school who is evaluating GAFE and hasn’t turned on gmail. This is especially relevant if you are using Blogger and want to easily manage student use, or if you are working with younger students. The solution is to use something called gmail+ email address creation. This basically creates many addresses which go through the same gmail account. Follow these steps:

1. Create a gmail account which is associated with the class,  eg. [email protected]
2. Gmail ignores any letters and numbers you add after a + sign and sends all emails to the one account while our system thinks each is a unique email. For example: room2Xschool+RobC@gmail.com and so on.
3. Use the above email address for creating student usernames and gmail will send all emails to the main account while still being able to use the above email for Blogger accounts.