Google Play Store for Education

UPDATE: After listening to last week's episode of TWIT (the Google I/O summary. I realized that my hope was a little overblown. Google Play for Education will be for the Android Store. The Chromebooks of course use the Chrome Web store. So until these two infrastructures talk schools must decide do the want an Android tablet or a Chromebook.

Will it be a game changer? Yesterday, at Google I/O, Google stepped up their educational game. As many of you know I would love to throw my weight behind Chrome initiatives in 1:1 classroom. The price point is right, the enterprise features fit, Google Drive and Sites can be the LMS...but...the Apps just are not there.

Now I have argued in the past that the teacher and not the app matters. Yet there are glaring holes in the app infrastructure in the Play Store. These are tools that enhance teacher pedagogical goals. Most damaging for me is the lack of interactive whiteboard apps (if you know of any please let me know). There are others.

I am hopeful that this new effort will fill the void. So hopeful that I just ordered a classroom cart of 30 Chromebooks. I will pilot the use of these Chromebooks at a summer camp for 150 seventh graders.

+ianobyrne and I will be running a ChromeCamp unconference this summer. Stay tuned for details

In sum, the Google+ features are amazing, but it is Google Play for Education that excites me the most.