For Kenton City Schools our original domain name was the standard kenton.k12.oh.us. Unfortunately, only techies could remember it correctly, so I registered kentoncityschools.org. I’m still kicking myself for not registering the .com version, it’s since been picked up by domain squatter. 
Kentoncityschools.org has served us well, even with it being longer than our original k12.oh.us version.
In the back of my head I had always wanted a shorter domain, and with more and more mobile technologies being put into use, it only made sense to try to find a shorter domain name that we could use to supplement our current two. Trying to find a shorter .com/.net/.org was futile, so I started looking at alternative top level domain names, and settled on kcs.me. Now you can go to http://kcs.me/ and it will automatically redirect to our main page. I haven’t started integrating it into to many other services, but I do plan on setting up our email accounts so you can use @kcs.me for any current address and it will work. We also have a custom 404 error page that let’s us setup keywords as shortcuts to commonly used web pages on our website, such as the user’s personal portal page (their MyCatPage, kcs.me/my) and staff home pages (kcs.me/collinsr).
For your school or business, have you thought about additional domains or am I just being weird?
When Ohio made the ITCs chnge from the .gov domain to .org we ended up with scoca-k12.org. As you can imagine, the -k12 has caused problems. Sometimes I can’t register my email address becuase an app is checking for .k12 and thinks I’ve made a mistake. We do have scoca.org but we’ve been told that for mail and web services we have to use the full domain.
Josh and I have setup scoca.mobi – it will mostly be used for the mobile version of our intranet
I’ve been toying with the idea of adding another domain for our school district, too. We currently give Google Apps for Education accounts to staff members, but there’s some interest in rolling it out to students, too. Because there are some things that staff members want to share with everyone in the organization (but not necessarily students), it might make sense to have two different Google Apps configurations. Plus, that would enable me to put student email in gmail and keep staff email in-house. But coming up with another domain name that’s short enough and that won’t cause confusion is quite a challenge.
@JohnR Our emails work with both of our domains for teachers, so they can use @kenton.k12.oh.us for those sites that do require an education email address. I haven’t set it up for the students, but it hasn’t been a concern.
@JohnS I’ve thought about that route too, the big problem is for students sharing work with staff. You’d have to set the staff up on both domains in Google Apps, which could become very tedious for them to switch between them (and I doubt they’ll want to run two different Firefox profiles or two different browsers so they can stay logged in to both domains.
I was quite surprised when I found that kcs.me wasn’t registered!
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
As one of the 7th grade teachers in your district, the shorter domain means less words for the students to spell incorrectly in URLs, email addresses, logins (Study Island, etc.). I finally have most of them bookmarking and using “autofill” functions, but still, when they’re at home or the library, I know that spelling out the “long” domain always requires more “work.” The shortened links on your “Of Bits and Bytes” are helpful too. Thanks for the easy fix!
Please let us/me know when email addresses are “shortened”!
There is the option of sharing outside the domain. I know in the calendar, for example, there are options to “keep private”, “share with everyone in my organization,” and “share with everyone.” If there’s a similar thing in Docs, they could collaborate within the group, and make it read-only to the rest of the world (which would include the teacher). Or, they could just specifically add the teacher by email address.