Google Classroom has become a very popular tool for teachers and students. The platform brings together all of Google’s Apps aimed towards education and more to make learning a fun and continuous process. Today, the tech giant announced that Classroom is getting one of its summer updates that brings in many exciting features. The most exciting of them all is parent participation.
Google has announced that teachers can opt to send parents or guardians summaries of their child’s performance. Yeah, good news for teachers and parents, not so much for the children.
The company says that these updates sent to parents will be automated, once a teacher invites them. The teacher can then select between daily or weekly email summaries of student work and class announcements based on the requirement. This tool will be surely very helpful as it will allow direct communication between the teacher and the parents. Also, parents will stay up-to-date on what is going on in their child’s school life.
The company is also introducing a new annotation tool that enables students to complete assignments, sketch out math problems or even create visuals of creative ideas directly on their devices. The feature is essentially like a portable classroom where students can draw and learn.
Teachers can use this feature to quickly grade assignments by writing directly on the student’s work or highlighting the most important passages in a text or novel. All in all, the new annotations feature is very helpful for both the students and the teachers.
The company is also bringing Expeditions, its platform for basic virtual reality experiences to Classroom. Students will now be able to learn by visually visiting places they need to learn about, be it the inside of your brain, somewhere on Mars or even just downtown. The company added that the Expeditions app is coming soon to iOS, too.
Other updates include a more organised UI that makes the platform easier to use on both the student’s as well as the teacher’s end. Teachers can organize the class stream by adding topics to posts and teachers and students can filter the stream for specific topics. Previewing files has also been integrated.
Using Cast for Education, students and teachers can now share their screens wirelessly. All you need is the latest version of Chrome. Forms will now allow teachers to add images to questions or as multiple choice answers. All this and much more is coming with the latest version of Classroom.
