Google Classroom is an initiative by Google to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments for classrooms. It combines the power of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and Calendar to help educational institutions go paperless. Today, Google gave it a refresh.
The new classwork page
Before, Google provided only one class stream for teachers and students to share new content and ideas. It used to get quite crowded to find what students and teachers needed. Now, the new classwork page lets teachers organize assignments and questions by grouping them into modules and units.
A better grading tool
Teachers can now give individual and personalized feedback to each student’s assignment through a new comment box. They can also toggle between each student’s submission without reopening their files. It works with Docs, Office files, PDFs, videos, and more.
Easily manage classes
- Reuse Classwork: Teachers who want to reuse previous classes can copy all topics from one class to another.
- Improved People and Settings pages:Â Teachers can view and manage co-teachers, students, and guardians on the People page. There’s a new Settings page for all class settings that lets teachers update class descriptions, display or reset class codes, manage and control how students post on the Stream, and more.
- Turn off notifications for a class: All notifications for a given class can be turned off.
Future updates
- Materials on the classwork page: Teachers will be able to add materials like readings or reference materials on the classwork page.
- Quizzes in a locked mode: Teachers will be able to use locked mode to keep students focused and distraction-free when taking Google Forms quizzes on managed Chromebooks. Teachers will also be able to create Google Forms quizzes from the classroom app itself.
The new updates will start appearing today and will roll out to everyone in a couple of weeks.
Source: Google
