Google accused of building its brand in schools

GOOGLE's pitch to improve the computer literacy of 500 teachers and 20,000 students will allow it to imprint brand awareness.

GOOGLE's $100,000 pitch to improve the computer literacy of 500 teachers and 20,000 students in a year will allow the corporate giant to imprint brand awareness among an "impressionable audience of schoolchildren".

Paul Harrison, a lecturer in consumer behaviour and marketing at Deakin University, said Google was a lot more than a search engine and would be interested in raising awareness of products by association.

"It's about making it harder to choose another email account over Gmail, for instance," he said.

"It's like being a Mac user or a PC user - the brand versus everything else."

Ben Neville, an expert in ethical businesses from the University of Melbourne, said Google was the model of the modern company as encapsulated in its sixth business principle: "You can make money without doing evil."

"There is, on average, a positive relationship between doing good and doing well," Dr Neville said. "Because Google has developed an effective reputation for corporate social responsibility, they have more leverage with the public than a lot of other companies."

Google's CS4HS program is being run by nine universities in Australia and New Zealand. Over a two-day workshop teachers are taught how to integrate computer literacy into a range of subjects including maths and science.

Selina Dennis, an English and software development teacher at Strathmore Secondary College in Victoria, took part in the pilot program last year.

"It involved looking at ways of changing perceptions of computational thinking. IT is not just skills-based, it's about thinking in logical ways," Ms Dennis said.

She said participants were provided with University of Canberra-developed curriculum materials, but they did not plug Google. "It was very altruistic," she said.

But Angelo Gavrielatos, president of the Australian Education Union, said he opposed any corporation working with schools. "We are concerned about corporations seeking to exercise influence over the curriculum," he said.

A spokesman for Google said there was no intention of promoting Google products.