Microsoft’s Live@edu versus Google Apps for Education

What free tools are these giants of the software industry providing to Education?

Both Microsoft and Google offer an evolving set of free online tools specifically for the education community. This week and next we’ll take a brief look at these offerings. I imagine we’ll find a good deal to like about both sets of applications, given the price and ease of a hosted (i.e. Internet based) tool set. Before starting I should add that Microsoft and Google are certainly not the only providers of free applications for education - in a brief look at collaboration tools back May I discussed a similar app suite from Zoho, but since Microsoft and Google are such behemoths of the software industry, there is particular interest in what they have to offer and how these offerings compare.

We’ll start with Microsoft’s Live@edu service.

Live@edu from Microsoft
It is my understanding that the Live@edu service started as a free email offering for students. Students can have a free mailbox with their educational institution’s domain name, and they can keep it after they graduate. Today these email accounts provide 10 GB of storage and include calendaring, spam filtering, and other features. The Live@edu services have expanded considerably from the initial functionality offered, and now includes access to the following additional applications:

* Office Live Workspace - For collaborative document editing
* Windows Live Skydrive - Skydrive provides 25 GB of internet based file storage

[Please click here to continue reading the complete post at EmergingEdTech.com, where I blog regularly about the use of Internet technologies in education. Thanks!]