Google Play for Education has arrived!

Google Play for Education!

It has been a good two weeks for tablets in the education market.  First Apple announces the new managed distribution model for app deployment on iPads (here's my post about that) and now this announcement from Google.

Google Play for Education is a selection of apps, videos, and books all selected by teachers and grouped by age, course, and even common core standard.  This will be a great boon for educators all over.  Having an app store were at least some semblance of oversight has been given and it's not like the wild west where anything goes.

Google has even realized that schools aren't like individuals and with access to credit cards and that the majority of our purchases have to be made with POs.  Now we've got access to curated content and the ability to actually pay for it.

I can't wait to get a chance to actually get my hands on this and try it out.

Finally... Managed Distribution from Apple

I had heard rumors about a feature in iOS 7 that would allow for "pulling back" applications.  In essence, I can assign an app to an iPad when a student gets enrolled in a class and then I can pull the app back when they move on and no longer need the app.  This would greatly ease our app management pains.  As it stands now, we have to be extremely careful about application deployment.  It's very tedious to make sure the correct iTunes account is logged into an iPad when we use a VPP redemption code.  If we're not careful, we can "give away" our redemption codes since they follow the iTunes account and not the device.  But that's all going to change now.

Apple now has added a "managed distribution" mechanism to iOS to allow the apps to be assigned to devices, and most importantly, unassigned from devices.  How did this not make major headlines when it was unveiled?  This is a major problem that we have faced with iOS devices and on the surface it looks to be the feature that we've always wanted.  I haven't actually had a chance to play with it yet, and the only thing I've read about it comes from this this Apple support page.  But so far, wow!  It's about time.

I've just done a bit more searching about this feature and it looks like there are a couple of sites with a few more notes about it.  It looks like enterprise iOS picked it up first with this article.

One downside that I do see is that it doesn't work for books.  But that's OK. I'll happily take what I can get*.

*This isn't happily because Apple is great and wonderful and I'll love anything that comes from them.  It's happily because this problem has been a real pain and with the number of iPads showing up increasing every day we'll take anything to help make management easier.

Practical School Technology

There's an interesting read on Jack Wallen's blog over at TechRepublic about the adoption of open source software in schools. It sparked a lot of discussion, but I guess any time you ask, "Why aren't insert-any-organizations adopting open source?" you're bound to get a lot of discussion.

There were comments from a very diverse group of people. A lot of suggestions were made, some good and some bad. But there were a lot of seemingly good ideas that just are not practical for public education. I thought about replying to some of the comments but I couldn't decide where I wanted to start. So I came up with the idea of starting this blog. A blog about more than just the who/what/when/where/why of adopting open source software in public education, but a blog about lessons learned in dealing with technology and public education, a blog about practical users of technology in education. I invite you guys to join me with comments so we can make this a great place to find ideas for things that work.