Google Play for Education, created in 2013, allowed
college students to buy or rent textbooks with the flexibility to read the content
on a mobile device. In the K-12 world, it was an app designed for the classroom
organized by subject and grade that came at a reasonable cost.
Even though Google intends to continue supporting the
service, it will stop selling licenses for the app on March 14. The app was
only available to a limited number of tablets, but the company plans to
continue making educational apps that work on all Android tablets available in
the Google Play Store.
Play for Education was launched to promote Android
tablets in schools. Since Google’s Chromebook has become the device of choice
for many districts, the new focus could be on changes to the operating system
that would provide even more classroom tools, according to Kristin Decarr in an
article for Education News.
“While
nothing official has been said about why the company decided to do away with
Play for Education, an unnamed Google partner executive believes the reason to
include capability issues, such as the limited number of student profiles that
can be put onto a single device, in addition to competition from Apple’s iPad,”
Decarr wrote.
