Google has rebranded its offering for educational institutions, G Suite for Education as Google Workspace for Education.

Google Workspace for Education will include all the tools that are part of G Suite for Education such as Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, among others. Currently, over 170 million students and educators worldwide are using Google’s suite of tools, the tech giant said.

With this rebranding, Google Workspace for Education will now be available in four distinct editions instead of just two.

The free edition of G Suite for Education will be renamed to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals with the changes being a new name and new features.

The paid editions include Google Workspace for Education Standard, a The Teaching and Learning Upgrade and Google Workspace for Education Plus.

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Education Fundamentals and Education Plus are already available today and institutions will be able to purchase Education Standard and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade starting April 14, 2021, Google said.

“Institutions that already purchased G Suite for Enterprise for Education will start to see the new edition name, Education Plus, in their admin console and will automatically get all the features of Education Plus,” it said.

New storage policy

The tech giant will also be making changes to the storage policy for educational institutions. It will be implementing a new pooled storage model. Google has traditionally offered unlimited storage to qualifying schools and universities for free, it said.

However, as part of the new storage model, schools and universities will get a baseline of 100TB of pooled cloud storage shared across all of their users which Google said is enough for more than enough storage for over 100 million docs, 8 million presentations or 4,00,000 hours of video.

“Nothing is changing today and we expect that more than 99 per cent of institutions will be within the pooled storage provided by the new policy,” it said.

This policy will go into effect across all Google Workspace for Education editions for existing customers in July 2022 and will be effective for new customers signing up in 2022.

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“To empower admins to adapt to this model and optimize their storage, we will provide tools to identify and manage how storage is used and allocated far in advance of the policy going into effect,” Google said. It will contact impacted institutions directly in the coming weeks “to discuss a range of options for getting the storage they need.”

“Large institutions will be provided supplemental storage later this year and all schools can gain additional storage through Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade,” it said.

The tech major also introduced over 50 new features across its education products. In India, Google also announced that the Teach from Anywhere hub launched in April last year is now available in eight Indian languages.