Google rebrands G Suite for Education to Google Workspace for Education

Google today announced a series of new features for its education-focused products, including the rebranding of G Suite for Education to Google Workspace for Education. The company first unveiled the Workspace brand for its suite of office applications in October, but the education-focused suite had retained the G Suite brand until now.

Among other changes to the tiers, the free edition of G Suite for Education is renamed Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals and G Suite Enterprise for Education is renamed Google Workspace for Education Plus. If you are already a G Suite Enterprise for Education customer, you will automatically upgrade to Google Workspace for Education Plus.

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Google is also announcing changes to the data storage policy for its education customers. Previously, Google offered unlimited storage to eligible institutions, but starting next year, the company will move schools to a pooled storage model, offering a base of 100 TB of pooled storage shared between an institution. The policy will go into effect for all existing Google Workspace for Education customers in July 2022 and will be in place for new customers who sign up in 2022.

New features are also on the way for Google's Meet video conferencing service to enhance virtual learning, and some of these features are also for non-education customers. The new features include:

• The ability to mute everyone on a call and end a call for everyone in the room. This will be rolled out soon and will be for education customers first

• Emoji reactions, which will launch by August for all Meet users

• Meeting transcripts, which will launch later this year for Meet education and enterprise customers

In addition, Google is integrating Meet and its Google Classroom product more tightly. Students will not be able to join Meet calls created from Classroom before the teacher, and Meet will be able to limit meetings to only students and teachers in a class based on a Classroom list. These and other features will launch later this year.

New features are also in the works for Google Classroom, including support for third-party service add-ons (available for Google Workspace for Education Plus or Teaching and Learning Upgrade clients) and offline support for the Android Classroom app.