Google Apps for Education Turns Two at EDUCAUSE

As we mentioned at the beginning of the month, the Google Apps for Education team recently celebrated its two year anniversary at the EDUCAUSE conference. Since our users are at the core of our mission for Google Apps, we invited our customers from schools around the country to join us for a special evening. We were excited to spend time with them because there's been a lot of activity with Google Apps over the past two years, especially in 2008. We kicked off the evening highlighting some of our significant milestones, including:

• We now have 2.5 million active users at thousands of universities worldwide
  
• We traveled more than 5,000 miles in a bio-diesel Google bus and met with students, faculty, and staff at 10 universities using Apps across the country.
  
• We recently announced some new web-based collaboration tools such as Google Video and Google Sites
  

We also focused on some of the latest trends in education technology, which is an important topic these days considering that recent studies predict that over 45% of universities are planning to outsource their email services*. It's becoming increasingly challenging for educational institutions to meet the demands of this new generation of students, and services like Google Apps is one way to offer students a better experience online. On our cross-country tour, we had the opportunity to hear from students directly about their experience with Apps, and here's some of what they had to share:

*source: Campus Computing Survey 2008

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education