Short and sweet version!
- International edu e-mail address provides direct access to a Google Drive with unlimited space (tested, works).
- Office 365 Education and GitHub Education were also accessible (tested, works).
- Amazon Prime Student was not accessible, their terms and conditions state that the program is only available to those "actively enrolled in at least one course at a college geographically located in one of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico" as well as requiring a username@*.college.edu formatted e-mail address (*. denotes an address that may include a subdomain but still ends in .edu).
- Update March 21st - AWS for Students does not appear to work at this time as the country is not currently supported (details at end of post).
Response Time:
rockeyboy was not online the BCT forums when I replied to this thread but promptly responded regardless (as the timestamps show) and once connected via Skype, communication was in real time for the entire session as I tested different sites/products and their usability. I immediately received an international edu e-mail address and a default password to log into Google/G-Mail with, which everyone will want to do first to get started. Now, for the goodies!
Accessible Services:
1) Google Drive
Of course the first thing to test was G Drive, but first a word of warning to anyone out there looking for this type of service. There are still people selling accounts from some US .edu sites where it can look like you have an unlimited Google Drive, however you have a probational account so when you go to use it, it will tell you that it's inaccessible.
Okay awesome, lets fill it up with the blockchain!
... or not. I'm pretty sure anyone trying this on BCT would be raked across the coals fairly quickly but this was a big issue on Fiverr at one point and whenever I see someone post an example image with Google Drive showing 0 GB it reminds me of this scam. However, as you can see below, I had no such issue and using Seedr and Thoai Media Services (a 3rd-party app for G Drive that allows direct uploading of a file from the web directly to G Drive, which was important to test as some business and school administrators disable the use of 3rd-party applications) to transfer 2 TV episodes from a public BT tracker to my G Drive in about 45 secs total.
So there is our happy guy again and this time he actually is able to use his G Drive
- however our new school of higher education has some more treats in store for us.2) Office 365 Education
The international edu e-mail address comes through for us again on this one. Simply visit https://products.office.com/en-us/student?ms.officeurl=getoffice365, enter your e-mail address and it will proceed to create your Office 365 landing page (it did take about 5 mins before everything was accessible). Here are some of the benefits (borrowed from a Microsoft announcement page)...
- The latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.*
- Installations of Office on up to five PCs or Macs.*
- Advanced capabilities on Office mobile apps including Windows tablets, iPad, iPhone and Android (when available).
- 1 TB of storage using OneDrive for business (unlimited storage coming soon).
- Office Online to work on Office files with anyone, anywhere in real-time.
*While some apps for phones and tablets are available to download, neither the complete suite or apps for all mobile platforms nor is installation to local computers supported. Microsoft has two tiers for their education services as seen here and the missing features fall under the "Office 365 Education E5" plan. Also while the landing page was still loading, if I visited some pages (such as OneDrive), the language would be that which the school administrator had set. I recommend letting your new account fully populate (as illustrated below) before attempting to use the tools.
If any of the tools are not using your system default language at any point, or if you want to change the language, simply visit https://portal.office.com/account/#settings and the last option will let you select the global language that you want to use for the Office 365 environment.
3) GitHub Education
If you are a programmer, developer or even just a user of open-source software then you are probably familiar on some level with GitHub. The Student Development Pack has a lot to offer those who dabble in code-fu, but there are even some select offers in the pack that should peek the interest of most everyone. Offers from Amazon Educate (which offers AWS credits), bitnami (1-click Cloud Hosted apps) and transifex (a great tool for professional translation of text into other languages) are some of the more notable offers on the list, however NameCheap steps up and offers an both a SSL certificate for 1 year as well as a .me domain of your choice, also for one year. Considering that a .me domain ranges anywhere from the $7 USD range during sales to just under $19 USD at other times, even if you have no interest in a .me domain personally, it is a popular TLD that one should be able to flip on the open market rather easily. For a full list of what's included in the Student Pack, check out GitHub's Student Pack page located here.
Thank You, but our Princess is in Another Castle:
If there is any other offer/service out there that someone would like tested, please feel free to ask! Again, as this is an international edu address, offers such as Amazon Prime Student do not work (I did actually try to enroll just to see, but was told that my e-mail address did not qualify). Also from what I've read on reddit, the 50% off discount for Spotify does not work by simply having an edu address (they apparently use a system to check if you are actively taking credit courses), however this can be bypassed by simply providing a school schedule/transcript, but for more on that, Google/reddit would have to be your guide as I've never attempted to do so.
Update: March 21st - For anyone who might be interested in an AWS Educate account, currently the institution (and furthermore, the country) is not eligible is not approved by Amazon. AWS Educate accounts are actually open to K - 12 students as well as higher education, so it still may be possible to apply the additional credits during sign-up if a different account is used (much like alternative student information can be provided to receive a discount on Spotify as mentioned above). I did attempt a traditional sign-up using the international edu e-mail address provided, but never received confirmation from Amazon/AWS.
