Google Play for Education has been a big topic from Google lately, where they are trying to get both Android and Chrome OS into the classroom, even though Apple was the big player there for a while. Now Google Play for Education will allow tablets to be shared among 5 students. So this means they all get their own account on the device, and it’s good for a classroom, as a classroom typically gets about 5 different classes per day.
Most schools want to get a tablet for each student, so they can take it home and do homework and such. Many schools don’t have that kind of budget. So being able to assign a tablet to a classroom and one student from each class gets to use it is pretty good, and much better on the school’s budget.
“With multiple accounts, schools can test out tablets at a meaningful scale before buying hardware for every student. Here’s how it works: “Bump” tablets together as usual to get them set up — you now have the option to specify the number of students who’ll be sharing each tablet (up to 5). Students complete setup by signing into one of the the tablets you’ve configured, then setting a pin code for individual access. From then on, each student can pick up their assigned tablet, select their account, and enter their pin to get back to all their stuff.”
You can find out more from Google’s Enterprise blog which is linked in the source down below. It’s great to see more technology making it into the classroom, after all this is the future, and you want to be teaching kids with the latest technology, not stuff from 10-20 years ago. What’s the point in that. It’s also great to see more Chromebooks making it into classrooms these days as they are inexpensive laptops which students can access Google Drive on.