GitHub Education is now free for schools

GitHub, the code sharing and collaboration platform that Microsoft is acquiring, today announced that its GitHub Education suite of services is now available for free to any school that wants to use it to teach its students.

GitHub previously trialed this program with a few schools and is now making it widely available.

It’s worth noting that GitHub has long been available for free to individual students and teachers who want to use it in their classrooms. GitHub Education goes a step beyond this and offers schools access to GitHub Enterprise or Business Hosted accounts, as well as access to training, dedicated support for the school’s head of IT or CTO — and swag.

As part of this program, students also get access to the Student Developer Pack, which offers free access to tools and credits for services like Datadog, Travis CI and DigitalOcean.

To participate in this program, a school has to make GitHub available to all of its technical departments, make sure that its faculty and students receive regular announcements about the service and send one person from each department to GitHub’s Campus Advisors training.