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| Technologies are rapidly growing and reaching new heights |
Highlights:
- More than 50 features for Google Classroom, Google Meet, and Google Drive
- Includes offline mode and improved mobile grading
- More than 170 million students and teachers across Google will benefit from this
During this COVID-19 pandemic, the search for remote teaching and learning applications has grown rapidly. After this, Google has advanced, to aid millions of Indian students who were left hanging due to the closure of schools.
Recently, Google has added over 50 new features to its Google Classroom, Google Meet, and other platforms. The new features have been introduced to enable a more effective learning and teaching experience for students and educators. Apart from this, it has also rebranded its existing G Suite for Education as Google Workspace for Education.
Features added to Google Classroom
When students attend school in-person, educators can easily notice where a student is lacking behind. A new set of Classroom features is aiming to do something similar for virtual learning, as well. With the new student engagement tracking feature, educators will be able to observe regular stats about how students are interacting with Classroom, like which students submitted assignments on a given day or commented on a post.
Other than this, Google Classroom is also introducing the new Offline mode for the android app. This includes reviewing their assignments, opening Drive attachments, and writing assignments in Google Docs — all without an internet connection.
Moreover, for educators, the Classroom Android app has also updated the mobile grading system which would allow them to grade student's submissions and share feedback with the help of an easy switch.
The classroom will also gain support for rich text formatting — like bold, italics, underline, and adding bullets across the web, iOS, and Android.
Google Classroom will render real reports in 15 different languages including Hindi, English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish to help educators learn pluralism. Apart from this, the Student Information System (SIS) roster will be available in the classroom, which will give the students the capability to log in, review reports and removals, etc.
Features added to Google Meet
The new features in Google Meet include the ability to support multiple hosts to allow more than one teacher for each virtual class. Not just that, teachers will have the option to “End meeting for all”, so they have complete control and can prevent students from staying on a call after the teacher has left.
Another much-awaited feature that was missing in Meet was the option to ‘Mute all’ and now, teachers would be able to mute all students to avoid interruptions. They would also get the option to decide whether the students would be able to unmute themselves or not.
This past year, the education community has inspired us with their creativity and resilience. This ability to learn, and teach, from anywhere is more important now than ever, and won't end when the pandemic does - Bani Dhawan, Head of Education - South Asia.
Features added to G Suite for Education
The major change in G Suite for Education is that it has now been rebranded to Google Workspace for Education. This workspace would continue to include the same products as before, including Meet, Docs, Sheets, Classroom, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, etc. However, the free version of G Suite for Education would be renamed to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, and the users of this version would not see any changes except for the new name and new features. The company plans several updates for its Google Workspace for Education product line in the weeks to come, including saved drafts in Google Forms (in Fundamentals) Google Meet meeting transcripts (in the Teaching and Learning Upgrade), and more.
