In light of Teacher Appreciation Day, Google launched a free education platform called Classroom today. It’s an online platform for teachers to manage their students and classroom responsibilities more effectively. No more mundane “waking up early to grade quizzes, collecting and returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine paper jams”, Classroom aims to scrape away the overhead associated with teaching and let teachers do what they do best – teach.
As part of Google Apps for education suite, Classroom will enable educators to create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. It will be interesting to see the various Google products that would be compatible with Classroom, as with most Google products, everything is integrated. Using Google Docs, Sheets and Slides would be a natural compliment.
With Classroom teachers will be able to,
- Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn’t completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
- Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
- Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page.
As with most policies on Google products, Classroom will be available to select teachers and schools will be able to use the product on an invite-only basis for a short while. Although now teachers can apply for a preview, the product will only be available to use in about a month. Google does say that by September, Classroom will be available for any school that uses Google Apps for Education.
Google also further promises that “Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.” Today’s launch comes less than a week after Google stopped scanning emails for Education users and delivering them ads. Google acknowledges student privacy, and it’s doing a pretty good job living up to that!
We’ve already signed up for a preview since, Skript believes that this might be the perfect tool for training students at Skool. We can’t wait for a month before actually trying out the product!