Google is giving 43,000 Chromebooks to Ukrainian teachers and helping to train them as the war forces millions of students to take up remote learning, officials from the company and Ukraine’s government said Tuesday.
The donation will aid the shift to distance learning for students remaining in the country and those who have been displaced, Google executive Matt Brittin said in an online post. Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science estimates that more than 3.7 million students are learning remotely, said Mr. Brittin, who is Google’s president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
“Thousands of schools are now affected by the bombings, and many families have been forced to flee their homes,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, in a social-media post on the partnership. “Even in such conditions, teachers heroically continue the learning process and conduct lessons online. They zoom in and send students assignments from bomb shelters,” Mr. Fedorov said.
Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is facilitating the arrangement, the officials said.
Google is working with local organizations to train around 50,000 teachers, through a series of workshops and online material, to best use the devices and Google Workspace for Education tools, Mr. Brittin said.
Google, meanwhile, has moved the bulk of its employees out of Russia. The Alphabet Inc. unit began offering to do so after a court in late March froze Google’s main bank account in the country.
