Google has made amazing progress in introducing its Google Apps for Education to education programs at all levels in the U.S. Particularly of interest is the focus on children K-12. The Google offering stresses two attributes that are also important to One Laptop per Child:
- Collaboration--which permits students and teachers to easily share their work, which accelerates the pace of learning
- Communications--which fosters collaboration by the ease of use and variety of alternatives means that the student can use to communicate with peers.
As reported in ReadWriteWeb, Google is now being used in five states including New York in K-12 classrooms. As schools come under increasing budget pressure, I expect that Google will continue to replace other higher priced alternatives and students will more quickly come to appreciate the benefits of open source software, cloud computing and collaboration. Some day soon it will be time to go short Microsoft stock. It is only a matter of time.
