If you are not familiar with Google Classroom , it is "a new tool in Google Apps for Education that helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and easily communicate with their classes". There has been some recent updates to it that is going to allow teachers a chance to do their jobs a whole lot better and make their students much more accountable.
According to Tech Crunch, Google launched a few updates to the Classroom educational platform that is going to make it easy on teachers as they prepare for the next school year. Not only will the Classroom platform integrate with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, but it will also create a Google Calendar for each class, allowing teachers to plan big events like field trips and guest speakers. Calendar also organizes the teacher's assignments for the students as well.
There have also been updates made for students as Google is adding Q&A and discussions features in the Classroom. This allows teachers can now post question to their class and optionally have student discuss each other's answers, with the option of the teacher grading that as well. As an example, the Google for Education blog says that a teacher could post a video and ask students to answer a question about it, or post an article and ask to write a paragraph in response.
The best part is once you create a lesson, they can easily be made for reuse. Then there are other new features in the Classroom as an ability to bump old posts up, the ability to make due dates optional, as there will soon be an integration with Google Forms in order to make tests, quizzes, as well as surveys.
The platform has been out for about a year, and this is their second round of updates. They had a lot of updates in the Classroom back in May, just in time for summer school. Back then, Google had stated that students had turned in more than 70 million assignments.
In addition to all these new features for Google Classroom, there is also something that Google has marked "In case you missed it". Last month, Google launched and advanced YouTube settings for all Google Apps domains as an Additional Service. The settings give Apps admins the ability to restrict the YouTube videos viewable for signed-in users, as well as signed-out users on networks managed by the Admin.
The expansion of Google Classroom has shown that classrooms are about to get a whole lot more technical in the next few years. Considering that most college students are required to have a laptop in order to receive and turn in their papers, it is really just a matter of time before grammar and secondary school students will have to have their own devices just to partake in the world of education.
