Posts Tagged → free

Breaking News: Teachers are Using Google!

Free for all forever
In the world of click-bait, Business Insider is a master.1 Consider their widely twittered about story with the excessively long title “Teachers love Google’s education products but are suspicious. Why is a megacorporation giving them a perfect tool for free?”.

I’m pretty sure Google’s products are not “perfect”. I don’t know many teachers who express much suspicion about them. And “free” depends on how the bill is being paid.

But at least this site usually provides a nice bulleted “executive” summary summarizing the main points at the top of their posts.

Like this:

Google for Education tools have taken off “like grass on fire,” industry analysts say.

I suspect the writer is reading “industry analysts” from 2015 since the current name is G Suite for Education and has been very popular in American K12 schools for at least three years, maybe more.

The writer also wants us the know about the “Google-powered devices [that] made up almost 60% of computing devices purchased for US classrooms in 2017”.

As for the laptops, they’re deeply discounted. Institutional pricing for an iPad, once the standby education hardware nationwide, is $299 while Microsoft devices start at $189. Google said a single Chromebook starts at $149 per unit for classrooms.

First, a Chromebook is not the same as a laptop. It’s a device using a browser window into the web, mostly Google’s web. Google also collects a royalty for each one sold as well as a fee from schools for each one being managed through their administrative panel. I think “deeply discounted” is also a euphemism for “cheap” but that’s a discussion for another post.

Throughout the article, the writer emphasizes that the G Suite products are free. However, he ignores or glosses over the fact that there is a cost being paid, even if teachers don’t pay it directly.

As I’ve ranted about in previous posts, Google and other companies giving away their products, still extract their payment through other means. All that data being collected may not be used for advertising, as it is in their regular products, but it’s still valuable to Google’s research departments. Very likely they find ways to track students into the real world, based on the data they contribute during the school day.

Then there remains the persistent issue of depending on free. While Google is not likely to disappear in the near term (like those in Audrey Watters’ EdTech Startup Deadpool), it doesn’t mean their current offerings won’t change or that a service valuable to you won’t be summarily killed off with little notice.2

Anyway, I’m not trying to tell anyone not to use Google, or any other software, app, or service. This is just one of my regular nags about being careful out there on the internets. Be doubly careful when guiding your students (or your own kids) through the same maze.

Image: Free for all forever by Howard Lake. Published to Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.

1. Yes, I’m very aware that linking to the article is contributing to the success of their click-baiting efforts. Moving on…

2. Looking at you Google Reader. Yep, still bitter. :-)

Another Reminder of the Downside of Free

View From The Dugout

To the marketing departments of the photographic industry, I am classified as an “enthusiast”. Someone who buys a DSLR camera, a couple of steps above a point-and-shoot, without trying to make money with it. If you’ve seen the occasional Photo Posts on this site, you’ll understand why I’m in that “not making any money” category.

In addition to posting images here, I’ve also been a member of the photo sharing site Flickr since 2005, an eternity in Internet time. Once the king of photo sharing, they have been eclipsed in recent times by Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, and other services.

It is from these two perspectives that I’ve been very interested in reactions to recent announcements from Flickr’s new owners about how they plan to change things.

Spoiler alert: people get very upset when a company cuts back on the features of their “free” product in order to make a sustainable business.

The company that bought Flickr1 plans to limit free accounts to storage and display of only 1000 images. Which is a substantial drop from the one terabyte of storage Flickr began offering five years ago. Pro users, those of us who pay $50 a year for the service (up from the grandfathered rate of $25 for old-timers), will get “unlimited”2 storage, plus no ads and other benefits.

In the age of everyone carrying a smartphone with a lot of memory, one thousand photos is not a lot. You probably have at least half that many on your device right now. Your kids are likely storing many more. But how many of those pictures are worth displaying? Be honest. How many are actually good enough to show the world, not just your relatives and friends?3

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what happens to Flickr going forward. More than anything I would like to see more and better activity in their communities. There are a couple worth an occasional visit but most I’ve seen have been inactive or full of spam for years.

However, even if you don’t use or care about Flickr, this should serve as another of your increasingly frequent reminders that free is not a valid business model. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, lots of equipment, and all the people supporting it (and you).

Almost always, at the “free” level of any web service, your cost is going to be limited functionality and a whole lot of uncertainty.

Image is one of my more than one thousand images in my Flickr account, a view of Nationals Park in DC from the home team’s dugout.

1. Who bought it from Verizon, which obtained it as part of buying the remains of Yahoo. Both owners largely neglected both the site and its community.

2. I’m always a little suspicious of anyone offering unlimited anything. Just read the fine print on your phone company’s “unlimited” data plan to see the limits on unlimited.

3. Who probably don’t want to see them either but are too polite to tell you. :)

No, Google Is Not Free

One of the 800-pound gorillas at ISTE, of course, is Google. They are “gold” sponsors (meaning they kicked in more money than the silver and bronze level companies) and have a huge presence on the vendor floor, both in their own booths and in the booths of dozens (hundreds?) of other companies that connect to them in some way. Plus many, many sessions and posters deal with their various education-related products.

And one term commonly associated with all of this Googley goodness is free. Educators love free, and they don’t pay to use GSuite, Classroom, Expeditions, Maps, Earth, ChromeOS, Photos, storage, and, of course, Search.

Except these services really are not free.

Instead of sending Google money, education users and their students, like the rest of us, are contributing labor and data to the company. In Google’s own words:

The Google Privacy Policy describes fully how Google services generally use information, including for G Suite for Education users. To summarize, we use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer users tailored content, such as more relevant search results. We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services. [emphasis mine]

Another way to look at our relationship with Google comes from an essay in Slate about another free product that’s been in the news lately, Facebook.

There are at least two alternative ways of viewing our relationship to Facebook… The first is to view ourselves as customers of Facebook, paying with our time, attention, and data instead of with money. This implies greater responsibility on both sides.

The second is to view ourselves as part of Facebook’s labor force. Just as bees labor unwittingly on beekeepers’ behalf, our posts and status updates continually enrich Facebook.

Swap Google for Facebook in those statements. We help their marketing department by putting their name and products in front of students, often for many hours a day. We also provide the labor to help develop and test products that will make them a lot of money.

And do not assume students are protected by working in a “closed” Google Education environment. Unless your network never connects to the outside world, there are many ways for Google (and others) to connect your “anonymous” students to advertisers, now and in the future.

Anyway, even with all that, I’m not trying to convince you to quit using Google’s products, either personally or in the classroom. I use some of them myself (although not as much as I used to). I even present conference sessions and workshops encouraging teachers to use Google Earth and Google’s other geo-related resources for their instruction.

However, everyone needs to understand that the cost of “free” admission to Google (or any other services that don’t charge at the door) is your data. Data that is stored, analyzed, connected with other data, and occasionally sold, stolen, or otherwise distributed to third parties. With your permission, since you agreed to the terms of service you probably didn’t read when registering for that first Gmail address.

So, by all means, continue using Google and other free services. But, in the wise words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, let’s be careful out there.

If you’ve never seen the classic cop show Hill Street Blues, you’ve missed some good TV. At least for the first three or so seasons. I think it’s available on Hulu and maybe other streaming services.

On The Hazards of Free

free stuff

In the past week or so, we have a few more examples of why it may not be a good idea to depend on free.

The first involves Padlet, a service that began about six years ago under the name Wallwisher. Padlet allows users to create a virtual bulletin board and then include others as collaborators. It was enthusiastically adopted by many teachers for instructional use, as well as by many of us who did professional development activities.

The service was attractive because it was relatively easy to use and, of course, the account was free. At least the basic version was free, which means someone had to be paying the server bills.

Padlet is one of many web-based services struggling to succeed using a “freemium” business model. Under that concept, a company makes money (or tries to) from the relatively small part of the user base who are willing to pay for advanced features. It’s a tricky balancing act trying to attract enough “premium” users while not giving away too much value at the free level.

This week Padlet decided they need to rebalance and announced a change to their pricing structure that removes some of that free-level value. The new model severely limits the number of Padlets that could be created by free users and, as you might expect, many of them were not happy.

Then there was another big piece of edtech news that didn’t get the same degree of Twitter coverage but still illustrates the problem with free.

Edmodo, a popular system for building communities founded in 2008 as a “Facebook for education”, was sold to a Chinese company. Their service was also free, at first, and teachers flocked to it, growing to more than 90 million users around the world.

Although Edmodo was able to raise money from investors, they never found a model that could sustain the company for the long term. The question now is how the new owners will change the service to recover their purchase price and provide an income stream. Whatever they decide will likely not be popular with users who have become accustomed to free.

Finally, there was one more reminder about the problem with free that landed in my email box. The message came from the CEO of Noosfeer, letting me know that the service will be “closing its doors to the general public” at the end of the month.

Yeah, I didn’t recognize the name either. Or remember having an account.

According to the website, Noosfeer is (soon to be was) a “content reader and aggregator”, evidently founded around four years ago. It sounds like something I would have wanted to try. I’ve opened a lot of accounts over the years. And forgotten about most when they didn’t fit my needs.

Anyway, this blip, along with the higher profile changes to Padlet and Edmodo are just the latest reminders that free is not a sustainable business model. Just don’t be surprised when “free” changes in a way you may not like. Or disappears.

The photo, by Frank Hebbert, was posted on Flickr and is used under a Creative Commons license.

Just the Cool Stuff, Please

Warning: early morning, barely edited, snark ahead.

Mixed in with all the other lists from the previous year, we find EdSurge’s Top Ten S’Cool Tools of 2016. Top ten cool tools for school, get it?

Anyway, the people at EdSurge1 don’t explain why these web services are the best of the year or by what measure they declare them to be the most popular of the more than 300 or so “showcased” in their weekly newsletter last year. But all that doesn’t matter, it’s a list. Let’s just get to it.

Number 10, a Jeopardy game. But this is a website so you don’t need one of the many freely available templates that have been around starting two days after PowerPoint was released.

Three of these top tools allow students to search census data, Wikipedia (for maps), and Creative Commons licensed photos. One question. Why aren’t we teaching students to responsibly search for this material on their own? Never mind, I’ve probably heard all the reasons – no time, students getting “off track”, they might find something INAPPROPRIATE!!, etc.

Two of the sites listed – one a “library of open educational resources with curated curriculum collections” and “a crowdsourced map and calendar of education events” – are really for teachers, not students. 161 education events in just the next 8 months? Really?

The only resource on the list that even sounds interesting is an app that uses the sensors built into most modern smartphones – accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer – to perform physics experiments. But haven’t we seen that before?

However, considering all this coolness is free, don’t get too attached. Free is a crappy business model for the long term health of something you rely on, in the classroom or otherwise.