Google is expanding its tools for schools, universities, and other educational institutions.
As Google announced on Wednesday evening, the tools for educational institutions and schools will be rebuilt. The free G Suite for Education becomes Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. The functionality of the free version should not change, as Google emphasizes.
At the same time, a paid upgrade is offered: The “Teaching & Learning” upgrade has extended functions at a price of 4 dollars per license per month. G Suite Enterprise for Education becomes Google Workspace for Education Plus, which is fully featured and costs $ 5 per student per month. Euro prices were not known for the time being. A detailed overview of the various features can be found here.
There is one notable change in storage space. So far, Google has offered schools and universities unlimited cloud storage, now the one with 100 terabytes per cloud is restricted for all pupils and students.
Classroom Form and Docs
The apps for use in schools are also being expanded. Classroom itself is to be equipped with extended analysis functions for teachers in the course of the year. In the future, Classroom Forms and Docs will offer, among other things, an offline mode, plagiarism control in 15 languages and a better citation system.
The video conference tool Google Meet also has new features. Above all, there are a number of new setting options for admins. In future, teachers will be able to end the meeting for everyone and thus prevent students from staying too long in the video conference after the call has ended. In addition, all participants can be muted by the admin. In the future, students will also be able to react to others with emojis. The quality has also been improved for low bandwidths and generally on Chromebooks.
New Chromebooks
The notebooks with Chrome OS are also popular devices in schools themselves. In 2021, a total of 40 new devices are to come from various hardware partners. In the future, Google also wants to place a special focus on accessibility across all functions and products. Google Docs is getting Braille support, Google Meet Live subtitles and Chrome OS is also being redesigned for more accessibility.
