Microsoft has acquired Flipgrid, an education start-up with an app that lets students record and share videos on specific topics with their classmates, on Monday, for an undisclosed amount.
About one and a half years earlier Microsoft had announced a partnership with Flipgrid. Today, Flipgrid integrates with many Microsoft products, including Teams for chatting with other people and OneNote for taking notes. But Flipgrid has paid to use Amazon Web Services cloud, which competes with Microsoft’s own Azure.
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This acquisition will help Microsoft increase its share in education, where Google’s Chromebooks have become popular.
Microsoft will make Flipgrid free of charge. Schools that already have subscriptions will receive prorated refunds, Microsoft said.
In the US, nearly 60% of all mobile personal computing devices that were shipped to K-12 schools in the fourth quarter were Chromebooks, while less than 26 percent used Windows, according to Futuresource.
In 2016, Microsoft unveiled a similar tool called Microsoft Classroom as part of its Office 365 productivity software package for education. It has since retired that product and added assignment features to Teams.
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