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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Google Ending Play for Education App

Google Play for Education, created in 2013, allowed college students to buy or rent textbooks with the flexibility to read the content on a mobile device. In the K-12 world, it was an app designed for the classroom organized by subject and grade that came at a reasonable cost.

Even though Google intends to continue supporting the service, it will stop selling licenses for the app on March 14. The app was only available to a limited number of tablets, but the company plans to continue making educational apps that work on all Android tablets available in the Google Play Store.

Play for Education was launched to promote Android tablets in schools. Since Google’s Chromebook has become the device of choice for many districts, the new focus could be on changes to the operating system that would provide even more classroom tools, according to Kristin Decarr in an article for Education News.

“While nothing official has been said about why the company decided to do away with Play for Education, an unnamed Google partner executive believes the reason to include capability issues, such as the limited number of student profiles that can be put onto a single device, in addition to competition from Apple’s iPad,” Decarr wrote.