This is another gift for students and educators

Oct 1, 2014 09:56 GMT  ·  By

Google has just given Educators a really cool present – access to cloud storage specially designed for them.

Drive for Education will be launched within the next few weeks and it will come packed in the Google Apps for Education bundle.

Drive for Education will have unlimited storage, support for individual files of up to 5TB in size, as well as automatic encryption for added privacy and protection.

“Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers. As always, the data that schools and students put into our systems is theirs,” said Google’s Ben Schrom, project manager of Google Apps for Education.

“Classroom, which recently launched to Google Apps for Education users, makes using Drive in school even better by automatically organizing all Classroom assignments into Drive folders. And Google Apps for Education remains free to nonprofit educational institutions with no ads or ads-related scanning.”

Before the year is over, Google will be bolstering the service with Google Apps Vault, which is a tool for administrators, while additional reporting and auditing tools will also be delivered, alongside Audit API for tracking files.

30 million students and educators use Google Apps for Education

As you may already know, Google Apps for Education is free for nonprofit educational institution. Google Classroom is delivered with it, which is a toolset that teachers can use to deliver classroom materials to students, while also tracking the various assignments they gave out and offering feedback to students for their work.

By integrating Drive for Education into this whole package, all the projects that go through Google Apps for Education, especially Classroom, will go through Drive, getting organized into Drive folders, making the entire experience seamless.

Google claims that in over the past two years, Drive has become the cloud storage and sharing solution for over 190 million people in the world, who use it at home, at work or school. At the same time, Google Apps for Education is being used by about 30 million students and educators, while Drive has “replaced their bookbags” because it’s easier to access all the information from a computer, smartphone or tablet.

“We want educators and students who use Google Apps for Education to be able to focus on the learning experience—not the technology that supports it. With Drive for Education, users can put an end to worries about storage limits and more easily maintain a safe, effective and compliant learning environment,” Schrom states.