There has been much change and uncertainty in the world in the past several months, with the education community being one of the most affected in terms of needing to introduce technological changes to how teaching and learning is experienced.
The Anywhere School, is Google’s approach to ‘back to school’ bringing updates to tools in order to lighten the load for teachers, families and students.
Below are some of the updates Google for Education have introduced or are in the pipeline:
A safer, more engaging Meet experience
-In September, an introduction of a larger tiled view of up to 49 people and an integrated Jamboard will be accessible for collaboration. There will also be new controls within Meet so moderators can choose to always join first, end meetings for all participants, disable in-meeting chat and much more.
-In October, custom and blurred backgrounds will be introduced to Meet along with breakout rooms and attendance tracking will be launched allowing for more engagement in classes and insights on participation.
-Later on in the year, a hand raising function will be enabled along with a Q&A polling.
Better support for students, educators and admins in Classroom
-A new to-do widget on the classes page will help students see what’s coming up, whats missing and whats’s been graded.
-Teachers can now share a link to invite students to their class, which makes joining a class much easier.
-Classroom will soon be available in 10 additional languages, to reach 54 languages in total.
-Admins will have access to more powerful toolsto manage G Suite and Classroom. For example, school leaders with Enterprise licenses will have greater visibility into Classroom usage via new Data Studio dashboards, which allow admins to see active classes, measure feature adoption, and monitor teacher and student engagement.
