Google Play for Education officially launches to all K-12 educators & students in the US

After announcing a new Google Play for Education store back at Google I/O in May and opening up a pilot program and app submissions in June, Google announced today Google Play for Education has now officially launched for all. In the video below, Google’s Shazia Makhdumi gives an in-depth walkthrough of the new service and notes that Google Play for Education will be the company’s mobile strategy for the 25M students/faculty currently on Google Apps, 3000+ schools using Chromebooks, and over 700,000+ YouTube EDU users.

The Google Play Education store will at first be only available on three tablets: Nexus 7 (a 7” tablet) available today, and the ASUS Transformer Pad (a 10” tablet) or the HP Slate 8 Pro (an 8” tablet), both available early next year. It will allow schools to search for content by subject matter and grade level and provide content that has been recommended by other educators. Instead of using credit cards, teachers will be able to purchase bulk quantities of apps and charge licenses against a balance from the school’s purchase order. The Google Play for Education service will also allow school’s that use Google Apps to instantly distribute an app to multiple devices in a school by setting up a Google Group.

It’s an extension of Google Play that’s designed for schools, simplifying discovery of educational apps and enabling developers and content providers to reach K-12 educators in the U.S. It offers bulk purchasing with purchase orders and instant distribution of educational apps, videos and other educational content to students’ Android tablets via the cloud. Google Play for Education helps your apps gain visibility with the right audiences, without having to knock on school doors.

Google is now allowing developers to mark their apps as suitable for the US K-12 education market in the Google Play Developer Console. After doing that, the apps will be put into a queue to be approved by teachers.

Google has more info for developers on its website here.