Google has announced a new free tool called Classroom as part of its Google Apps for Education suite. This tool helps teachers create and organize assignments, provide feedback to the students, and communicate with their classes easily. Classroom is still in preview and is based on the principle that educational tools should be simple and easy to use and is designed to give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn, according to Google. The features of the Classroom tool include:
- 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.
Considering privacy, the app is free from ads like other apps for Education services and its content or student data will not be used for advertising purposes. Google says that teachers and professors can apply for a preview of Classroom over at classroom.google.com/signup and based on the requests it receives, the company will invite a limited number of educators to try Classroom “in about a month.”
SOURCE: Google
