Top 5 advantages of Google apps for education

We recently visited an education exhibition at Sheraton in Abuja and we pleasantly realised that Nigeria now has a growing market and producers of educational applications, such as software for school records, result compilation, admission process, etc. However, while most of the private school proprietors were interested in buying the apps to improve production and […]

We recently visited an education exhibition at Sheraton in Abuja and we pleasantly realised that Nigeria now has a growing market and producers of educational applications, such as software for school records, result compilation, admission process, etc. However, while most of the private school proprietors were interested in buying the apps to improve production and reduce cost in their schools, they found too expensive the monthly/termly subscription being requested by the marketers. I told one school owner that he could get some of the apps for free if he looked around the open source community. However, you don’t even have to go that far, Google is enough. These past days, I’ve begun showing schools how to use Google’s Learning Management System (LMS).  The following article, written by Daniel Herrera for Getedspire.com, shares five benefits of using the tools.
Google Apps for Education is helping schools and districts offer their communities better ways of working together, with over 14 million students, faculty and staff worldwide now using Google Apps for Education and 72 of the top 100 universities in the U.S. having gone Google (according to Google). Institutions for higher education everywhere are using the cloud to improve collaboration, increase efficiency, save costs and reduce environmental impact without sacrificing privacy or security.
So what does this mean for K-12 education and why should school and districts adopt Google Apps for Education? Here are five advantages of Google Apps for K-12 Education.
1. Maintain Privacy & Security
Google Apps is designed to provide educational institutions with a safe platform for data, offering better security and reliability than most schools could achieve on their own. Google Apps for Education includes dozens of security features specifically designed to keep data safe, secure and in your control.
2. Foster Collaboration
Google Apps for Education can help streamline academic tasks like essay writing and class scheduling. Because everything is 100% powered by the web, emails, documents, calendar and sites can be accessed and edited anytime, anywhere on almost any device.
Additionally, tools like text and video chat and Google+ hangouts make quick, effective communication a snap.
By removing time-consuming bottlenecks, Google Apps for Education frees you up to spend more time on learning and teaching, making it an ideal environment for learning in the 21st century.
3. Save Costs
Switching to Google Apps for Education can help your school save significant costs. In addition to Google Apps for Education licenses being free (really!), you’ll save money by avoiding the need to buy or maintain your own servers or client software.
To keep tools up to date, all you need to do is use an internet browser. Apps is updated every time you login, so you automatically get the newest features as soon as they’re ready. This means students, teachers and administrators always have access to the latest software, including the newest features and security updates, without incurring additional costs or hassle.
Google Apps also boasts exceptional return on investment as a result of reduced costs. A recent study by Forrester Consulting found that the ROI of switching to Google Apps is over 300 percent.
4. Encourage High Adoption
Hundreds of millions of individuals worldwide are already using Google Apps products like Gmail, Docs and Calendar. Because students and teachers are familiar with the tools outside of school, using them in a school setting comes as second nature to many. This is especially true with email as the majority of students already use Gmail for personal use. This existing familiarity means that for the user, migrating to Google Apps is often not a migration at all. As a result, schools that switch to Google Apps for Education consistently experience a high rate of adoption with students, professors and administrators alike embracing the new tools.
For example, a case study revealed that when the University of Notre Dame in Indiana switched to Google Apps for Education, people increased their use of email, had 20% fewer questions for the Help Desk, and indicated a 36% increase in IT satisfaction since the migration to Google Apps. This high rate of adoption was further complemented by a cost savings of over $1.5 million to the university.
5. Go Green
In addition to minimizing IT-related expenses, Google Apps for Education can help your school reduce its environmental impact. For example:
Google Apps is powered by Google’s energy-efficient data centres, making it a less energy and carbon-intensive solution than traditional on-premise servers.
Switching to the cloud also means you can spend less on electricity. Simply moving your email hosting from on-premise to Gmail could even help you achieve up to 80 times greater energy efficiency.
Collaborative tools such as chat and shared documents help students and teachers reduce extraneous printing, travel costs between campuses and your overall environmental footprint.