Apple And Google Battle It Out In Education Sector

Google’s trying to catch up and striving to penetrate the educations sector and strengthen its presence there.

At Google I/O 2013, Google’s developer conference, Google announced some exciting developer tools and Chrome enhancements.

Along with these mainstream developer announcements, Google also announced its presence in the education industry, aiming primarily at schools.

Apple ventured into the education industry long before Google’s foray, and today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space.

Apple’s built an arsenal around education (and we aren’t even talking about the huge inroads it’s built through it’s education-focused hardware drive! Focusing only on apps for the moment, lets take a look at Apple’s Education wares:

• First, a free app called iBooks Author lets anyone create a digital, interactive textbook.
• Second, an update to a piece of software called iTunes U lets teachers plan their curriculum and communicate with their students over the iPad. “iTunes U”, is supposed to allow anyone, anywhere, at any time to take courses for free.
• Finally, a new textbook store called iBooks 2, also a free app, will feature digital e-books for schools.

Apple most recently signed a USD 30 million contract with the LA Unified School District to bring its iPad to the system’s students.

Even though Apple dominates this market, the extent to the domination is not such that Google is left with no room to play.

With its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging Apple’s dominance.

Google introduced Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play into the classroom. The new store, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools which have been integrated into Google Play itself.

Teachers will now be able to search and recommend content by category and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators.

What’s more, every piece of content served is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google added more functionality to this segment of the Play Store by allowing students and teachers to buy or even rent books with discounts up to 80%.
Like movies and books, educational titles will sync across devices and platforms, so you can swap between the tablet and the phone.

Textbooks will also synchronize highlights, bookmarks, and notes.

According to Google, five major textbook publishers have already joined the project and will have titles ready at launch.

If Google strengthens its partnerships, it will be able to penetrate the seemingly near-impervious education sector and seed its devices in universities and schools.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.