Google just got students and educators a pretty sweet gift: “Drive for Education” offers unlimited free cloud storage to the school crowd.
Drive for Education is similar to Drive for Work, which launched in June, except Drive for Education is free. And Drive for Education has a tool called Classroom to help teachers organise class assignments.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can get free Google storage as long as you still have an active .edu email address. “The way students get Drive for Education is they need to be at a school that has Apps for Education. You can’t sign up as an individual, but need to be with a school that has the offering,” a Google spokesperson told me. So far, 30 million students, teachers and admin have access to the program, and that number will increase as more schools sign up.
This is a smart scheme on Google’s part. The irresistible price of free will attract students and get them accustomed to using Drive (plus, giving stuff to educators is always a halo-inducing PR move). I’d call this the “John Mayer Plan” because, as everyone’s favourite douche-crooner noted, “Fathers be good to your daughters […] girls become lovers, who turn into mothers,” and Google’s fathering its user-daughters into lovers…OF GOOGLE DRIVE. And mothers…of children who use Google products. Getting ’em hooked young may be the key to winning the storage wars. [CNET]
Picture: Google