How To Get Microsoft Office 365 For Your School For Free (Part 2 of 3)
Below are the steps required to receive the free Office 365 A1 license for your entire school.
The step by step process is:
1. Sign up for a trial account
2. Verify ownership of domain
3. Confirm school eligibility
4. Change from A5 trial license to A1 free license
In this post, we will cover the first two steps:
1. Signing up for a trial account
2. Verifying domain ownership
We will cover the remaining steps in the next post.
Signing up for a trial account is very fast and simple. First go to https://products.office.com/en-us/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans and click on ‘GET STARTED FOR FREE’ and go through the signup process.
First, click on ‘GET STARTED FOR FREE’.
Second, enter the relevant information into the form below.
Third, create a user ID.
Fourth, verify that you are not a robot.
Then you will be provided with a user ID and a url for the sign in page.
After you have created an account, the next step is to attach your school domain to the license. If your school domain is for example, abcschool.org, then you will need to prove that you own this domain so that you and your school members can log into Office 365 via their school email address and more. Below are the steps to follow, as of September 2018. You will need to go to the back end of where you registered your domain (e.g. godaddy, wordpress, hostgator) and work with your DNS settings.
First, you will receive an overview of what to expect.
Second, you will need to enter your school domain name. If your school web address is www.abcschool.org, then you will type in the domain abcschool.org.
Then you will receive instructions on the things you will need to do with the DNS settings. There are specific instructions with screenshots depending on where you registered your domain. If the site you registered your domain does not appear, you can select ‘general instructions’, which will not have screenshots, but is useful nonetheless.
Below is what a general instruction looks like.
Once you have completed the process, the system will confirm that you own the domain, and will give you access to the Office 365.
The last two steps leading up to claiming the free license will follow in the next post.
