Google News Inside

Maryland Education “Goes Google”

Posted by jonathan at 9:18am EST on 08/09/2010

A quick snippet from the Google Corporate Blog,

Today we’re happy to announce that The Maryland Education Enterprise Consortium (MEEC) will make Google Apps for Education available to 1.4 million students in the state. MEEC is comprised of the University System of Maryland, Maryland Higher Education Commission and Maryland Department of Education, and provides software resources and services to its 194 members across the state. This includes all 24 public K-12 districts, libraries and all public and private higher education institutions.

Maryland joins the ranks of Oregon, Colorado and Iowa, who each enabled their educational institutions to “go Google” under one statewide agreement. And more than 8 million other students, staff and faculty across the globe actively use our free messaging and collaboration suite.

In addition to Google Apps, this agreement also enables MEEC member institutions—for example University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)—to license Google Postini Services such as Google Message Security, for use with the existing email infrastructure to enhance Spam filtering and email security for students, faculty and staff.

According to Assistant Vice President of IT at UMBC, Mike Carlin, students were overwhelmingly in favor of Google and vocal about their preference when it came to email since it “works exceptionally well with their mobile lifestyle.”

As we have all watched Google be pro-active about education, there is no surprise to me that Google is excited to capture yet another university’s online presence.

Google is working day and night to capture these new markets, as the need continue to rise each year.

A huge congrats to Google for this win. I’m quite excited to see what Google is going to continue to do, to be innovative in the educational space.