In a way, this is kind of like the cigarette industry's mantra: get em' while they're young. Google Apps suite, which has been targeting colleges and universities for full implementation of its tools, is reaching deeper into the education system to appeal to high school teachers.
Google Docs has teamed up with Weekly Reader's "Writing for Teens" magazine, a Readers Digest-owned classroom publication, to help teachers instruct on the value of peer revision. When I was a kid, peer revision meant pairing off in class and taking a red pen to my classmate's printed document. Now it means hunching in front of a computer and logging onto Google Docs, where the application does all of the tracking of revision history for you.
I'm a huge fan of web-based document creation sites, so I very much appreciate this initiative for high schoolers. Through this partnership with Weekly Reader, there are PDF articles from the "Writing" magazine for tips on teaching revision to teens as well. As Readers Digest is looking for more ways to expand its web services, this partnership with Google Docs seems like a sensible way to be more of a resource while appealing to those that will be using computers for business and pleasure for years to come.
As many other printed media companies seem to be doing, Readers Digest has also launched an ad network through its web property allrecipies. In other news, web-based document creation site Buzzword is now open to the public.