‘Google Play For Education’ Comes To Canada
Google Play for Education, an education-focused app store designed to cater specifically to schools and teachers, has come to Canada, alongside an announcement from Google that Canadian schools will now be able to order Android tablets directly from Google, as per an article on MobileSyrup. Google’s product manager for Google Play for Education, Rick Borovoy, describes it as a “solution to make Android tablets and Chromebooks extremely easy to manage and scale in school, and then to put awesome content on those devices.”
Borovoy and his Google Play for Education team piloted the program in Canada with the help of the Upper Grand District School Board in Guelph, Ontario, and found the program easy to adapt to the Canadian education system.
“It was awesome to work with Upper Grand and some of the other Canadian schools boards because they have very project-based approach to teaching. We think that is the absolute right pedagogy for teaching kids to be productive in this century.”
As reported by Android Community, the Google Play for Education “store” grants students access to hundreds of classic books, teacher-approved classroom content, and more education-themed apps, all for free, and features five models of Android tablet, all approved ready for classroom use.
Bill Mackenzie, the Upper Grand District School Board’s IT Liason, was very positive about the results from Google Play for Education. “Teachers noticed that the students felt comfortable using the devices and that it made the classroom more interactive. The technology and breadth of resources has accommodated the different learning styles of our students.”
“Students love sharing their photos and documents in Google Drive across devices by bumping one device to another, what students call ‘high fiving.’ “
Last year, updates were made to Google Play for Education to allow tablet sharing among up to five students. Each tablet can hold up to five different sets of login credentials, and retain settings, apps, and data for each individually. The tablets come loaded with Google Docs, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Earth by default. As Borovoy puts it, “It gives them access to the entire Google app suite, and many of our tools for education are also integrated into that account.”
Google seems dedicated to bringing Google Play to an ever-widening audience, recently introducing an age-rating system for the regular Google Play Store, as previously reported by the Inquisitr. With efforts such as Google Play for Education and the highly-anticipated Chrome for Work, the internet giant appears intent on becoming a part of every aspect of life across the globe.
[Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images]
