Google’s rebrand of G Suite to Workspace in October first rolled out to businesses, with the promise that personal and nonprofits users would follow later. Google Workspace for Education is rolling out next with more editions that better suit the needs of schools from pre-K to the PhD level.
G Suite for Education only had two tiers, with Google learning that a “one-size-fits-all approach isn’t what educators need from tools.” The free edition is now called Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals.
If you’re currently using this edition, you won’t see any changes besides a new name and new features. We’ll keep building new solutions for this free version by listening closely to educators and their needs.
Google Workspace for Education Standard is the next tier available at $3 per student/year with the addition of enhanced security, advanced mobile management, and audit logs that that provide analytics, as well as”greater visibility.”
A Teaching and Learning Upgrade ($4 per license/year) makes Classroom more powerful with originality reports that can analyze papers submitted by students for plagiarism, while Meet adds call transcriptions. These enhanced tools for instructors are available as an “Upgrade” on top of Fundamentals or Standard.
Lastly, there’s Google Workspace for Education Plus ($5 per student/year) with everything above included and other “transformational tools” to replace G Suite Enterprise for Education.
This is the ultimate edition for a comprehensive solution with advanced security and analytics, teaching and learning capabilities and more.
Given that they are just name changes, Education Fundamentals and Education Plus is already available, while the other two offerings will be purchasable from April 14th. A full feature comparison is available here. As of today, Google Workspace for Education is used by 170 million students and teachers around the world, up 30 million since June 2020.
Meanwhile, the other key change today sees Google no longer offer unlimited free storage to schools and universities. Workspace is instead switching to a pooled storage model where institutions get a “baseline” of 100TB shared among all users. This allows for 100 million docs, 8 million presentations, or 400,000 hours of video, with the company noting how “this updated storage model will impact less than 1% of institutions.”
However, as we’ve grown to serve more schools and universities each year, storage consumption has also rapidly accelerated. Storage is not being consumed equitably across — nor within — institutions, and school leaders often don’t have the tools they need to manage this.
Larger schools will get “supplemental” capacity later this year, while Education Plus and the Teaching & Learning Upgrade includes more storage. This policy, with a similar one soon going into effect for personal accounts, will apply to existing customers in July 2022, while it will be the default for new customers next year. Admins will get tools to “identify and manage how storage is used and allocated,” with Google contacting impacted institutions over the coming weeks.
Other announcements today include:
- Google Classroom for Android getting offline mode as usage nearly quadrupled in last year
- Google Meet adding emoji reactions, low bandwidth improvements
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