Games and Learning

Google continues to move aggressively into the edtech space as it launches new initiatives today at ISTE

One look at the sponsors of this week’s sponsors at the edtech-tastic ISTE conference in Philadelphia and you will see lots of names you would expect – Pearson, Dell, Microsoft and even game firms like Brainpop and game-rater Common Sense Media.

But the company that has more than any other swept the formal school technology space is not a “Gold,” “Silver” or “Mission” sponsor. It’s Google, the company that now has more educational devices in school than any other.

Google’s Chromebooks and Android tablets have taken schools by storm in recent years, driven by the devices’ lower prices and the growing array of tools for teachers.

Just today, Google announced two new initiatives: a share button that allows students and teachers to place content directly into the Google Classroom program and an API that allows developers and school IT folks to work with classroom management program directly.

Monitoring #GoogleEDU on Twitter on Monday morning showed the degree to which tech savvy teachers and IT people, along with the developers trying to reach them, have embraced the tech giant’s entry into the edtech space.

A handful of developers have been working with Google Classroom to integrate the API, but for developers looking to get a leg up on the competition you should check out the Google Developer Access to get an early crack at the new API.

Consolidating Market?

The growth of Chromebooks and Android tablets has already taken its toll on one competitor. News Corp. announced last week that its educational division, Amplify, which made such a big deal out of reintroducing its learning tablets at 2014’s SXSW EDU conference, was scrapping (or at least suspending) the whole business.

“We continue to support our tablet customers and are still fulfilling orders for additional tablets,” Amplify told Bloomberg News in an-email. It even added that it “continues to receive and consider new contract requests,” but the company has stopped ordering new tablets from suppliers in Asia.

Amplify’s announcement late last week is, in part, an acknowledgement of the growing power of Google.

Google’s main competition in the tablet – and increasingly the desktop – wars is Apple and they seem less ready to join Amplify in ceding schools to the Googleplex. On the eve of ISTE, Apple announced another wave of tools and new content for the iTunes U product, several of which aim to compete directly with recent launches from Google. Re/code reported on Thursday that with Apple’s new tools “students will be able to turn in homework from their tablets; these documents will carry a timestamp recording when the student submits term papers, book reports and other work. An integrated grade book will alert teachers when a student’s work is complete and ready for review, or if it’s time to send a reminder.”

Apple still boasts some 15 million iPads in the nation’s schools, but its has been slow to respond to Google’s aggressive push into schools, launching teacher-focused tools within iTunes U often weeks, if not months behind Google.

And Google, who only two years ago sounded as if they were still more flirting with the school market rather than going all in, comes across very different now.

For instance, the company has aggressively launched a series of new teacher training initiatives, from free Google Hangout conferences to a major Training Center built around teacher professional development. A Google Education blog from last Thursday announced the new, free online professional development platform, saying they saw this as a way to meet teachers where they were.

“We didn’t need another help center with how-to articles; we needed to start where teachers start, with learning objectives, classroom tasks and teaching strategies,” said Jay Atwood, EdTech coordinator at Singapore American School and project lead for the Training Center’s lesson creation. “With the new Training Center, we do just that.”

Having tracked these companies for the last few years, there seems to be a clear shift here from the Google of old that wanted to help teachers and would build things to aid in the adoption of technology in schools to an aggressive stances where Google is packaging and marketing itself as an EdTech company. Their site boasts Google for Education now has 45 million users in 190 countries and produces the most popular educational device on the market.

Their solutions range from simply using the array of Google applications built specifically for school like Classroom as well as those tools anyone can use like Drive, Calendar and Gmail for free. To supplying whole school districts with laptops or tablets, vetted educational applications and training for teachers.

A New Educational Publisher?

As Google devices strengthen their foothold in the classroom, Google Play for Education has emerged as a critical sales platform for games and other tools that want to reach teachers.

Developers who have directly partnered with Google have landed prime real estate in the Google for Education platforms and scoring a spot often elicits clear excitement from the company, like the literacy app Speakaboos that tweeted this out today:

We’re excited to be a @GoogleForEdu education partner! @google #googleedu #ISTE2015 #EdTech #elearning pic.twitter.com/fDupwCwXdz

— Speakaboos (@speakaboos) June 29, 2015

But like their Apple competition, the way in which companies and products make the cut remains strangely opaque.

Since we first started reporting on Google a couple of years ago, the tech giant has always stressed that they recognized the need to address the discoverability question. Rick Borovoy, product lead at Google Play for Education, told us, “We feel like it has been too hard for innovative developers to get their content into schools and too hard for teachers to find that content and get it to the right students… We bet on curated, but we left a way in for teachers to decide for themselves what’s educational.”

That means that once an App is submitted to Google Play for Education (and Google Play), it is reviewed by what is only described as “an independent group of teachers” to connect the game to age and Common Core Standards.

We asked Google for a bit more info on this process, but they declined to comment.

Still, the effort to curate is seen one of the major hallmarks of the Google Play for Education effort and as this company solidifies its role in the technology within schools developers seeking entrance into that market should take a hard look at the requirements Google has published.

The flashcard and quiz game app Quizlet focused on taking advantage of their connection to Google and saw use of their product soar.

And Quizlet is still there, today being announced as one of the first companies to make the Google Classroom “share” button a part of their tool.