Throughout most of my elementary, middle and high school existence I learned that computers from home were generally very different from what most of us had in home.

At home, the vast majority of us had DOS or Windows. At school, it was Mac everything, though I will admit that Windows PCs finally started to show up during my high school days.

The reason for this was simple, Apple had very good discounts and special deals for school systems. Now it seems that Google is planning to take a chapter out of Apple’s book and is going after school systems with its Chromebook this holiday season.

Google is teaming up with DonorsChoose.org to offer the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook for just $99 to schools. For those that don’t know, that is a $330 discount from the original retail price of $429.

How does it work? Teachers need to visit DonorsChoose’s site and request a Series 5 Chromebook for their classroom by December 21st.

Once the request is posted, people can make donations to support their classroom and once the total funding is met, the Chromebooks are sent out to the classrooms. A classroom can request anywhere from one to thirty Chrome-based laptops.

While this seems to be a holiday promotion, it could certainly be a sign of things to come for Google. With more school systems relying heavily on the cloud for research, writing and more, Google’s Chromebooks might make quite a bit of sense in today’s connected school systems.

What do you think, could Google find a potential niche in the educational system, just like Mac has over the years?

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