Avni Shah, Vice President, Education, Google announced the updates in her recent blog post, “As educators worldwide have reinvented their practice online, we’re also adapting our tools to meet the evolving needs of their new educational landscape. This year, we’re taking a virtual approach to ‘back to school’ with The Anywhere School, bringing Google for Education announcements to hundreds of thousands of viewers in more than 250 countries around the world.”
Google Meet to get larger tiled view
Its popular video-conferencing platform, Google Meet will introduce an integrated Jamboard Whiteboard in Septemberto facilitate collaboration.Moreover, the update will also include a larger tiled view for up to 49 people. Furthermore, Google will also be rolling out more controls for moderators. The new update will allow permissions to always join first, disable in-meeting chats as well as permissions to end a meeting for all participants. Sharing further insights, Shah added that later in October this year, Google Meet app will roll out further upgrades to allow users to use blurred or other custom backgrounds during their meetings.Additionally, the company will also introduce Breakout rooms and attendance tracking features for its Education customers. The update is aimed at facilitating more engagement and participation insights during the virtual classes. Subsequently, it has further announced to finally introduce the hand raising feature for all its customers later this year. It will also be launching Q&A feature as well as polling feature particularly for G Suite for Education customers. “Plus, we’ll launch a new temporary recordings feature which will be available to all Education customers for free (premium recordings will still be part of G Suite Enterprise for Education),” Shah informed.
Google Classroom New Updates
Talking of the Google Classrooms, the platform will soon be receiving a new to-do widget on the Classes’ page to provide students with the schedule for the particularclass thus enabling students to see what has been graded and what’s coming up next. The search engine giant has also announced that Google Classroom will soon extend its language support for ten more languages.The upcoming updates will also allow teachers to directly share the class invite link with their students making it easier for students to join class. Interestingly, new Google Education features will now make it difficult for students to submit copied projects and assignments. G Suite Enterprise for Education will now enable teachers and professors to examine student submissions against webpages as well as other student submissions at their school for potential plagiarism. Additionally, it has also announced a new learning management system for non-Classroom users called Assignments to help educators automatically create and distribute personalized copies of classwork students in their respective Google Drive folders. Also Read: GOOGLE LAUNCHES NEW PIN-ENCRYPTED SAFE FOLDER Moreover, its new Smart Compose and Auto Correct feature in Docs will help users in composing high-quality content faster. The two features will help them to cut back on repetitive writing and will also reduce the chances of spelling and grammatical errors. The Citations feature will further help students to manage and format their sources directly in Google Docs. However, with its new set of Google Education features, the company will not only be targeting students and educators but also parents and guardians. Google has also announced a new Tech Toolkit for students’ families to help them better understand the new e-learning technologies that their children use.
