14 DAY TRIAL // As Google grew into the giant it is today, it also managed to maintain a good image with its business practices but also with the green projects it's involved with and, more recently, with a greater emphasis on education. Google has been offering the Google Apps suite of services to schools for free for a while now and it's really going for this market. But now it took things a step further with a conference dedicated to education titled Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age hosted at Google's headquarters in collaboration with Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.
The search giant was fully behind the effort, trying to show how committed it was to education perhaps, with CEO Eric Schmidt present as well as cofounder Sergey Brin and vice president of search and user experience Marissa Mayer. Brin shared some of his ideas about the future of education which, unsurprisingly, he sees as greatly connected to technology.
He believes that, as computers become cheaper, schools should take advantage of this and integrate technology more into the learning process. And with broadband also getting cheaper and more available, Internet access should be considered essential and the schools should take advantage of it both as an information source but also for collaboration tools enabling students to work together easier.
"It's important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems," Brin said. "The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust." Brin himself dropped out of high school at some point and, just like Microsoft's founder Bill Gates, left college to get started on the business that would eventually lead to Google and to him becoming a billionaire.
A number of other personalities involved in education or technology also spoke at the event. Overall, it is great to see such a large company actually wanting to invest in education but Google's interest does have a more practical side too. With students using Google products from an early age, the brand sticks with them and later when they join a company they would want to use the same tools they have gotten used to, which Google hopes will drive adoption of its Google Apps suite for enterprises.