Starting Today Bing For Schools Is Giving More Than 800,000 Students An Ad-Free Search Experience

Bing For Schools officially launched today, a program created by Bing to promote digital literacy to students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The  program was initially announced in June, inviting school administrators to register for the free service that gives participating schools ad-free Bing searches, SafeSearch filters to remove adult content from all Bing searches performed within a school’s network, and short lesson plans attached to Bing homepage images with an archived list of the lessons saved on the Microsoft Partners in Learning site.

According to the announcement, a number of school districts have enrolled as launch partners, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, Atlanta Public Schools, Fresno Unified School District and Detroit County Day School. Bing claims more than 800,000 students will have access to the “enhanced” Bing experience as of the start of this school year.

Now that the program is launched, Bing has elected to allow any school the opportunity to earn Bing Rewards credits toward Microsoft Surface RT tablets – not just schools enrolled in the official Bing for Schools program.

Bing will aggregate the credits for everyone supporting each school; once a school reaches 30,000 credits, it will receive a Microsoft Surface RT tablet. Users can sign up for the Bing Rewards program on the Bing Rewards page. According to Bing, about 60 Bing Rewards users can earn a tablet a month for a school.

Schools interested in participating in the Bing for Schools program can still register, but only a limited number will be accepted into the pilot program.