Google for Education

Google Apps for Education is helping schools and districts offer their communities better ways of working together, with over 14 million students, faculty and staff worldwide now using Google Apps for Education and 72 of the top 100 universities in the U.S. having gone Google (according to Google). Institutions for higher education everywhere are using the cloud to improve collaboration, increase efficiency, save costs and reduce environmental impact without sacrificing privacy or security.

Why should schools adopt Google Apps for Education? Here are five advantages of Google Apps for Education.

1. Maintain Privacy & Security

Google Apps is designed to provide educational institutions with a safe platform for data, offering better security and reliability than most schools could achieve on their own. Google Apps for Education includes dozens of security features specifically designed to keep data safe, secure and in your control. For example:

Because Google’s data center’s don’t include unnecessary hardware or software, the number of potentially exploitable vulnerabilities is greatly reduced.

Google Apps offers an extra layer of security with two factor authentication, which greatly reduces the risk of hackers stealing usernames and passwords.

Browser sessions are automatically encrypted without the need for VPNs or other costly, cumbersome infrastructure. This helps protect students and teachers’ data as it travels between the browser and Google’s data center’s.

Your data belongs to you and you have full control over how data is shared and who it is shared with. Google’s data center network provides exceptional security and guarantees reliable access to your data.

2.       2, Foster Collaboration

Google Apps for Education can help streamline academic tasks like essay writing and class scheduling. Because everything is 100% powered by the web, emails, documents, calendar and sites can be accessed and edited anytime, anywhere on almost any device.

Additionally, tools like text and video chat and Google+ hangouts make quick, effective communication a snap.

By removing time-consuming bottlenecks, Google Apps for Education frees you up to spend more time on learning and teaching, making it an ideal environment for learning in the 21st century.

Fast, easy collaboration capabilities help bring students, teachers and teams together in real time.

3.       3,Save Costs              

Switching to Google Apps for Education can help your school save significant costs. In addition to Google Apps for Education licenses being free (really!), you’ll save money by avoiding the need to buy or maintain your own servers or client software.

To keep tools up to date, all you need to do is use an internet browser. Apps is updated every time you login, so you automatically get the newest features as soon as they’re ready. This means students, teachers and administrators always have access to the latest software, including the newest features and security updates, without incurring additional costs or hassle.

4.       4,Encourage High Adoption

Hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide are already using Google Apps products like Gmail, Docs and Calendar. Because students and teachers are familiar with the tools outside of school, using them in a school setting comes as second nature to many. This is especially true with email as the majority of students already use Gmail for personal use. This existing familiarity means that for the user, migrating to Google Apps is often not a migration at all. As a result, schools that switch to Google Apps for Education consistently experience a high rate of adoption with students, professors and administrators alike embracing the new tools.

For example, a case study revealed that when the University of Notre Dame in Indiana switched to Google Apps for Education, people increased their use of email, had 20% fewer questions for the Help Desk, and indicated a 36% increase in IT satisfaction since the migration to Google Apps. This high rate of adoption was further complemented by a cost savings of over $1.5 million to the university.

5.     5,Go Green

In addition to minimizing IT-related expenses, Google Apps for Education can help your school reduce its environmental impact. For example:

Google Apps is powered by Google’s energy-efficient data centres, making it a less energy and carbon-intensive solution than traditional on-premise servers. 

Switching to the cloud also means you can spend less on electricity. Simply moving your email hosting from on-premise to Gmail could even help you achieve up to 80 times greater energy efficiency.