Google Updates Classroom for Improved Teacher, Student Control
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.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.