ASSORTED GOOGLE APPS FOR CREATING AND LEARNING E-CONTENT FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

Education

National Seminar On "Adroitness in e-Content Development for Higher Education"

Google Apps for Education is in my view, a serious contender to be the solid foundation underpinning any school’s use of technology.While nothing is ever ‘free’ in education, GAFE comes pretty close from a user perspective. Google bill the product as ‘free Web-based email, calendar & documents for collaborative study anytime, anywhere.’ With unlimited free storage given to each user, it is difficult to argue. They do impose a limit of 5Tb on individual file size. For reference, that’s a 600-hour long video file, so you’ll probably be able to squeeze under that ceiling. Google’s commercial model is based on advertising, but no advertisement or user data collection take place within GAFE, following recent court cases in the US. Google have gone to great and public lengths to reiterate how they don’t snoop on data in GAFE domains. It’s free to education, some would argue, because Google want students to continue to use their services as adults. All technology companies exist to make money; it seems that Google’s model of doing so has yet to reach the stage at which it is accepted without suspicion. Google Drive which is a user’s online storage, integrated into the Google Calendar and Mail. Drive serves as an excellent example of how cloud-based storage can help the learning process, allowing the user to Access files anytime on any device with an Internet connection, Work offline with documents, Share files/ documents with others and collaborate in real time ,Share folders with students and receive and feedback on assignments, Save/ export a document in a variety of formats including those used by MS Office, Work with other Google Apps to provide a platform for forms, surveys, projects andSave to Google Drive with two taps of an icon or clicks of a mouse.

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