Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals (Free)

[JazzFlute]

I have 15 Chromebooks to manage (Covid Lockdown devices) and in the process of trying to persuade Google I own the school domain as previously registered by an ex SLT employee and seem to be going round in circles filling forms in etc. but think nearly there.

 

Just asking as its a small amount of Chromebooks to manage and I don't want to purchase a £20 or whatever it costs license for each device so wondered if I can "manage" them sufficiently with the fundamentals (free) subscription.  Not really wanting to do much with them apart from some basics (set homepage) create generic user accounts.  Can I add them to Entra using Fundamentals?

 

[willtech]

Good luck with their support at the moment, still waiting 3 months them to upgrade our Google Workspace to Education. If you cannot access the previously registered if their is not much data you can fill in the form to start a new tenant.

 

Think you can but you will hit Google login first and then Entra ID after. But SSO must be setup on Configure Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft for Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID - Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn. But any setting you want to set or lockdown you would be able to. The £20 is worth it for manageability. 

[edmokeski]

Am sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think you have a little bit of apples vs oranges going on.

 

The management licenses (Google Chrome Education Upgrade, I think is the one) for Chromebooks are a one-off but fairly unavoidable fee to bring them into your Workspace tenancy and manage them there.  The tiered fundamentals vs. standard vs plus, vs teaching & learning upgrade is to do w/ user licenses.  The answer there is a definite "yes," you can manage your Chromebooks perfectly fine w/in a Workspace tenancy that is entirely Fundamentals (including setting up to do your authentication via Entra, if that's what you're asking there). 

 

So the bad news is, I think you're going to have to spend a bit of money, but the good news is it's a lifetime/perpetual license and not an annual sub.  I think they run in the neighbourhood of 30USD or 30GBP per device - can't quite remember which.  Not impossible your Chromebooks came w/ the license depending on supplier arrangements etc. etc.? May be worth going back to check over all paperwork from when they were purchased just in case you get lucky on that score.

[JazzFlute]

2 minutes ago, willtech said:

Good luck with their support at the moment, still waiting 3 months them to upgrade our Google Workspace to Education. If you cannot access the previously registered if their is not much data you can fill in the form to start a new tenant.

 

Think you can but you will hit Google login first and then Entra ID after. But SSO must be setup on Configure Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft for Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID - Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn. But any setting you want to set or lockdown you would be able to. The £20 is worth it for manageability. 

 

Yeah I originally tried to sort it last year and gave up when wasn't receiving any support emails back but think I'm a bit further forward now as just added a DNS record to hopefully prove to them I own the domain.

 

Only want the Chromebooks to do a bit of online learning and nothing else and as they are 5 years old probably plan to "retire" them in a couple of years and replace them with Windows devices so just trying to "manage" them the best I can for the next couple of years without paying.  Ideally just Browser management and generic Year user accounts till I retire them.

[edmokeski]

6 minutes ago, willtech said:

Think you can but you will hit Google login first and then Entra ID after. But SSO must be setup on Configure Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft for Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID - Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn. But any setting you want to set or lockdown you would be able to. The £20 is worth it for manageability. 

 

Yes, we have this set up, and the user is presented first w/ a Google login where they put in their e-mail address.  That then locates their account, twigs that it authenticates via Entra, and shunts you over to a MS login process (in a kind of popup) where you annoyingly often have to put in your e-mail address a second time.  Mildly irritating but very much not the end of the world and worth it to maintian a single set of credentials.  Means you can also rely on your Entra MFA and not worry so much about Google's implementation.  And I definitely second Will here on the management licenses being a worthwhile purchase.

[JazzFlute]

Yeah from the research I've done this all sounds right.  No edu licenses came with them just the devices and nothing else.  I just don't want to spend anything really for the sake of 2 years use and they only really going to be used by a small group of students so probably end up being something simple I implement to just log whose using what etc. and when.

[willtech]

5 minutes ago, edmokeski said:

 

Yes, we have this set up, and the user is presented first w/ a Google login where they put in their e-mail address.  That then locates their account, twigs that it authenticates via Entra, and shunts you over to a MS login process (in a kind of popup) where you annoyingly often have to put in your e-mail address a second time.  Mildly irritating but very much not the end of the world and worth it to maintian a single set of credentials.  Means you can also rely on your Entra MFA and not worry so much about Google's implementation.  And I definitely second Will here on the management licenses being a worthwhile purchase.

You can use the login hint to pass the email address across to Office 365. To do this, go to Google in the SSO with third-party IDPs select your SSO profile, then in SP details you will see Autofill email select this and use the option login_hint and save.

 

 

Note the setting will not show on legacy SSO profiles.

[JazzFlute]

4 minutes ago, willtech said:

You can use the login hint to pass the email address across to Office 365. To do this, go to Google in the SSO with third-party IDPs select your SSO profile, then in SP details you will see Autofill email select this and use the option login_hint and save.

 

 

Note the setting will not show on legacy SSO profiles.

 

Think I'm leaning towards buying 1 device license and seeing what "extra" i can do with it and is it worth it compared to managing them as standalones for the next 2 years.

[Ditto]

What filtering/monitoring approach will you be using on the Chromebooks?

[jthompson]

You'll need to have your Google tenancy in place before purchasing your Chrome Enterprise upgrade(s), since you'll need to specify the Google domain to tie them to when ordering them.

 

One thing you can do with Chrome upgrade applied is set the device up with a managed guest session, which might be of interest to you: basically the end user just clicks 'go' to open a browsing session without first having to sign in. That guest session can then have certain start pages, allowlisted/blocklisted URLs such that you can have it as a super-focussed session for particular sites.

 

If you need to mandate certain browser extensions, such as for web filtering, then those are applied at the user level, so device licenses aren't involved there.

 

Without the device licenses, you'll need to set up WiFi manually on each device, but for the small number you're talking about, that's perhaps not an issue. It would mean that the user can fiddle with network settings, though, so YMMV depending on your environment.

Edited December 16, 2025 by jthompson

[JazzFlute]

23 hours ago, Ditto said:

What filtering/monitoring approach will you be using on the Chromebooks?

 

Without being able to install the Netsweeper agent the default filtering policy applied is "pupil" so the strictest.  Monitoring will be crudely done by allocation and a booking spreadsheet with the same pupil using the same device as only going to be used by 15 users for around 3 online lessons a week with staff in the room. Hopefully i think my domain is now sorted and if so ill use my Google Workspace for Education (free) to push the Securus webstore App out to the devices so monitoring will be covered better.

 

Only primary age children and devices are used for a specific website and support staff also in the room when they use them.

 

[Olliedawg]

On 15/12/2025 at 09:50, willtech said:

Good luck with their support at the moment, still waiting 3 months them to upgrade our Google Workspace to Education. If you cannot access the previously registered if their is not much data you can fill in the form to start a new tenant.

 

Think you can but you will hit Google login first and then Entra ID after. But SSO must be setup on Configure Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft for Single sign-on with Microsoft Entra ID - Microsoft Entra ID | Microsoft Learn. But any setting you want to set or lockdown you would be able to. The £20 is worth it for manageability. 

We've been waiting since September. Have you heard anything yet?

[willtech]

No, still no update still getting the same old theirs a backlog in the new process. We are now at over 4 months now surly it does not take this long to approve a school. Anyone got any contacts in Google ?

[willtech]

4 minutes ago, Olliedawg said:

We've been waiting since September. Have you heard anything yet?

No, still no update still getting the same old theirs a backlog in the new process. We are now at over 4 months now surly it does not take this long to approve a school. Anyone got any contacts in Google ? Support and the so call "approvals team" have been useless. 

Edited January 14 by willtech

[JazzFlute]

3 minutes ago, Olliedawg said:

We've been waiting since September. Have you heard anything yet?

 

I've been waiting on support as i couldn't register my domain to my school (previously registered by ex employee years ago) and after automatic emails and not being able to talk to anyone I've just given up as cant see a solution to explain my issues to a human.  Shocking support for education.

[willtech]

I think I will be having some words with the Google Stand at Bett. 

[Olliedawg]

I see.

 

I don't even get replies anymore to emails i've sent regarding our case.. shame as we wanted to start using chromebooks

[Dan2025]

On 14/01/2026 at 12:40, Olliedawg said:

I see.

 

I don't even get replies anymore to emails i've sent regarding our case.. shame as we wanted to start using chromebooks

Apologies on resurrrecting this thread but was wondering if you'd had any progress with this? I've been waiting a few months and have tested flex on a few of our dfe netbooks and it's like a new laptop super snappy. 60-70 doorstops currently, even just a set of 10-15 would be nice to just chuck at people if they needed to do some basic things.

 

 

[willtech]

12 minutes ago, Dan2025 said:

Apologies on resurrrecting this thread but was wondering if you'd had any progress with this? I've been waiting a few months and have tested flex on a few of our dfe netbooks and it's like a new laptop super snappy. 60-70 doorstops currently, even just a set of 10-15 would be nice to just chuck at people if they needed to do some basic things.

 

 

I have shared your comment with Anna Artemyeva at Google. She was fantastic in helping us out when we got stuck. 

[Olliedawg]

13 minutes ago, Dan2025 said:

Apologies on resurrrecting this thread but was wondering if you'd had any progress with this? I've been waiting a few months and have tested flex on a few of our dfe netbooks and it's like a new laptop super snappy. 60-70 doorstops currently, even just a set of 10-15 would be nice to just chuck at people if they needed to do some basic things.

 

 

 

All I will say is good luck. Took over 8 months for us from initially applying. I spoke to someone from Google at BETT in February, we got approved about a month or so after that.

 

I believe they had a massive influx of schools wanting to join when the Windows 10 EOL in Oct 2025 was near.

[willtech]

4 minutes ago, Olliedawg said:

 

All I will say is good luck. Took over 8 months for us from initially applying. I spoke to someone from Google at BETT in February, we got approved about a month or so after that.

 

I believe they had a massive influx of schools wanting to join when the Windows 10 EOL in Oct 2025 was near.

Also to add to this their automatic process went over to a manual process.

Edited May 1 by willtech

[Primus]

3 hours ago, Dan2025 said:

Apologies on resurrrecting this thread but was wondering if you'd had any progress with this? I've been waiting a few months and have tested flex on a few of our dfe netbooks and it's like a new laptop super snappy. 60-70 doorstops currently, even just a set of 10-15 would be nice to just chuck at people if they needed to do some basic things.

 

 

You need to speak to a Google Partner such as Getech, Canopy or C-Learning, they can get you approved quickly.

[willtech]

3 minutes ago, Primus said:

You need to speak to a Google Partner such as Getech, Canopy or C-Learning, they can get you approved quickly.

 

Tried Getech when we had issues, they could not help. They stated they were in the same position.

[Primus]

Google partners can definitely get this sorted. I have no idea why Getech were unable to help.

 

Perhaps try one of the other two.

[KK20]

We also put flex on our old DFE doorstops.  The battery life surprised me the most, old Dells get a good 5 hours at least still.  Sure, no apps, but not really an issue when you can add fake PWA "apps" keeping the browser cleaner.