Google has been making great inroads into the classroom, through the distribution of Chromebooks and more, their Google Classroom product which offers teachers and students better digital ways to interact has also been getting traction. Today Google has announced three major new features for Google Classroom that should add new depths to your childs learning experience and make it easier for you to keep abreast of what’s going on.
Firstly a summary of student work and class announcements, can now automatically generated into an email by teachers to send to parents or guardians. This email summary can keep you up to date with what’s going on in the classroom, and what work they are doing. Teachers will need to verify a guardian or teacher so that not just everyone can get access to the information.
Next, Teachers and Students can now annotate homework or assignments directly in the Google Classroom mobile app. This means students can work on assignments, add notes or highlight work, while teachers can mark assignments, make notes or highlight relevant passages in their notes to make students lessons easier. Annotations give both students and teachers a virtual whiteboard to work on, which should make it easier to convey ideas.
Google is also expanding Expeditions, their VR experience which lets students use cardboard with a mobile device, to include iOS devices. Google opened the experience to Android devices a couple of months back, but this expands the experience to more devices meaning schools can use existing infrastructure.
Not only are they expanding to iOS, they’ve also included more expeditions, now with over 200 Expeditions available. In the new expeditions, teachers and students can visit places like Bhutan or explore the human vascular systems, all from their classroom.
As we previously wrote about last week, Google has also officially announced Inbox is now available for Google for Education. They’ve also added in the ability for users, including Teachers, to add images to forms making a visual question much easier.
Google has also announced their ‘Cast for Education’, announced back in June, has now gone live for everyone, with teachers and students now able to share their screens across more complicated school networks, with full control by the teacher. Students can be invited to share their screen with the class on a larger screen to show off work or presentations.
Finally, Google has added the ability to add topics to posts in Classroom letting them organise their lessons on the fly. Teachers and students can also filter the stream for specific topics, as well as preview documents, PDFs, images and videos.
If your student is using Google Classroom, and there are quite a few of them in Australia, then you should be hearing about these great new features soon.
Those expeditions sound pretty cool. Any idea if you can get them without being part of a school/classroom thingo?
You can, but looks like you need a Leader (Teacher) that then leads an expedition for followers (Students). Makes sense, the Expeditions setup comprises of a Tablet for teachers and headsets for the students.
I`m going to try this with a bunch of kids and see how it goes.