Microsoft is offering Office 365 Education for free to students and teachers in the US

We’ve detailed in the past how Microsoft is revolutionizing the classroom in K-12, college and university institutions with their proven Office and Office 365 productivity suites and hardware such as the Surface and Perceptive Pixel devices. The company is no stranger to the education industry, but a problem lies in teachers’ awareness levels of Microsoft’s available solutions.

In the US, Microsoft offers both its full Office suite and its Office 365 cloud-based equivalent to teachers and students for considerable discounts and even for free in some cases, but students and teachers don’t always know about this. So Microsoft set out to make it as simple as can be to find out.

“Millions of teachers and students are already eligible through their school to utilize the advanced editing and collaboration capabilities, unlimited OneDrive storage and Dropbox integration of an Office 365 subscription and may not realize it.”

Starting today, all teachers in US-based educational institution would have to do is to head over to www.office.com/teachers and enter their school-provided email address to see if they are eligible for a free subscription to Office 365 Education. Likewise, students can do the same by navigating to www.office.com/getoffice365.

Office 365 Education includes the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher, in addition to 1TB of OneDrive storage with unlimited storage coming soon. The subscription can be used on up to 5 PCs or Macs and can take advantage of Office Online and the Office mobile apps for Windows, Android and iOS, so it’s got students and teachers completely covered.

While Microsoft currently offers Office 365 University with a 4-year subscription for only $79.99, students enrolled at qualifying schools can get Office 365 Education for nothing at all, absolutely free. So it’s definitely worth checking for eligibility if you’re in the US. Microsoft has also mentioned that the self-sign up process for both students and teachers will be rolling out to global markets later this year.