As they plunged into a project on ancient Egypt this fall, Jay Martino's Cupertino Middle School students probably didn't realize they were on the front lines of a high-stakes battle between Google and Microsoft.

But the sixth-graders, who did the entire research project on a "walled" network of student Web sites using document-sharing software and e-mail provided by Google for free, are among the thousands of students worldwide that Google and Microsoft are fighting over.

With the recession taking a bite out of university endowments and public school budgets alike, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation's colleges, universities and schools to the companies' free e-mail and other IT services that run on the Internet "cloud" — outsourcing that can save a large university hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — has only grown more fierce. With the two companies fighting to baptize a future generation of computer users with their products, the stakes for both are significant.

The battle has already reshaped classroom technology. Just a year ago, Martino's sixth-graders would have generated reams of paper as they researched mummies, Cleopatra and King Tut. This fall, the students' work exists on the "cloud" — bits of data flowing across Google's network, accessible from any computer with a Web browser and a password.

"It really has empowered them," said Martino, a former software engineer
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who enthuses about the potential of Google Apps Education Edition to enhance students' collaborative skills.

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/sunnyvale/ci_13921041?source=http://www.helpmyos.com