Google on yesterday, August 7 has announced a refresh of its Classroom, its biggest since launch back in 2014. It continues the tech giant’s mission to provide simplified tech for teachers and students so that they can spend more time learning.
Among the newly introduced features, the first is that of the Classwork page. It provides better organizational attributes to teachers for assignments and questions via grouping into modules and units. This makes the Stream an advanced hub of class discussion and activity, helping students develop online communication skills within their classroom community.
Secondly, a new grading tool is built into the workflow of Classroom. This contributes to pacing upgrading and encouraging more insightful engagement for the students. It works with Office files, Docs Editors, video files, PDFs, and more.
Via the grading tool, instructors get a comment bank for saving and reusing commonly used feedback. Quick toggling between student files and submissions during grading is also possible, where the tedious opening files individually are not required anymore.
Next, improvements in updating class settings, working with multiple sections of a class, and more are being brought by the new Google Classroom refresh. Accessing anything and everything in the Classroom has not been more convenient for teachers and students before!
While this takes care of setting up and management of classes, other such advancements include: copy and reuse classwork, improved people and settings page, and the ability to turn off notifications for a class.
As Google reports, thousands of teachers have participated in the Classroom beta version in July. This report will remain incomplete without the mention of the company’s discovery that these teachers loved the collaborative tools of G Suite, which further led to these updates, taking care of the complicacies regarding certain features.
But the aforementioned pack of features embraced in the refresh is not all. There will be additional features launched soon based on their input. These involve materials on Google Classwork page, Classwork page for existing classes, and creating quizzes in locked mode.
With the biggest yet redesign of the Classroom, Google is as well providing a warm hand to the teachers to master and cope up with the advancements. It has announced new training in the Teacher Center that was created by Google Classroom experts. Ranging from new features to tips and tricks, these pieces of training will guide you to get the best out of the new updates.
The rollout of the refresh and the new trainings started yesterday, with a timeline of 2 weeks for reaching everyone. You can go to Back to School FAQs for gaining more details on the said updates.
