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Google Updates Classroom for Improved Teacher, Student Control

• By Michael Hart
• 10/15/14

Google for Education has added five new features to Google Classroom in a move the company says will make it easier for students and teachers to use. At the same time, the company announced that Classroom, launched just this summer, is now being used by 40 million students, teachers and administrators throughout the world.

The five new features are:

• A way to use Google Groups more effectively. Schools that already have Google Groups set up can now use them to invite students to Classroom. Google Apps administrators can sync their school's class rosters with their student information systems to set up classes in a matter of seconds.
• The abnility to mark assignments as "done." Not every assignment a teacher gives students requires something to be turned in. For instance, teachers often assign chapters to be read or experiments to be conducted. Now, with Classroom, students have the ability to mark assignments as "done" even when they don't necessarily have to turn anything in online. At the same time, the Assignment page now can be refreshed so that students can more easily keep track of upcoming work.
• More teacher controls. Teachers can now set permissions for what classes or individual students can post or comment on class streams. If necessary, they can mute individual students from posting or commenting and look at items that might have previously been deleted.
• Exporting grades. Teachers can now download every grade of a student in a class at once, making it easier to move assignments to any gradebook.
• Sorting names. Teachers now have the ability to sort students by either their first or last names, depending on their reasons for sorting.