GoogleGroups for reading groups across three elementary schools

The Orange Southwest Supervisory Union has three elementary schools who despite having the same curriculum and content programs don't do any student collaboration projects between schools.

This year a small group of teachers, who teach grades 5 and 6 would like to use the elementary Google domain to do some cross school collaboration.  These teachers have been collaborating for three year on literacy curriculum so their idea was to find some way to have students do book groups using GoogleGroups.  I like this idea for a number of reasons.  First,  it is using technology to enrich something that they already do.  This is a meaningful way to use our Google domain.  Second, two of these elementary schools are pretty small.  For some students their reading level is so beyond their peers in their school that it is difficult to be challenged. This will allow them to find students with similar reading skills and reading interests.   Lastly from a social and cultural stand point these students will all end up in the class in middle school.  This is an opportunity for them to interact with each other before they arrive in 7th grade.