Google announces new virtual education tools for teachers, students

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Google announced new education tools for teachers, and students to facilitate learning in the virtual education space.

The new tools will be available through Google’s various products such as Meet, G Suite, and Classroom. While some of the features will be rolled out in the coming months, others will be available later this year, Google said in a 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,” Avni Shah, Vice President of Education at Google, said in a blog post.

In order to improve engagement during the virtual sessions, a larger tiled view with up to 49 participants, and a collaborative whiteboard with Jamboard will be available in Meet, in September.

For more privacy, blurred backgrounds will be coming to Meet in October. Also, attendance tracking during virtual sessions, and breakout rooms, so a class can be split into smaller groups for simultaneous discussions, will be available in the same month, as part of G Suite Enterprise for Education.

Further, to help students ask questions, a hand-raising feature will be introduced in Meet, later this year. Plus, a new Q&A and polling feature to engage students will be coming to G Suite Enterprise for Education.

Google Meet polling feature.

All education customers will be able to use temporary recordings feature, coming later this year, to record a meeting and share the recording within their domain for up to 30 days before the video expires.

The company is also bringing moderator controls such as disable in-meeting chat, end meetings for all participants, manage join requests, and an option that requires a teacher to join a meeting first, in September.

Google Classroom will be receiving some new features for a more efficient virtual setup. These will include a new to-do widget on the Classes page to help instructors and students better discover and track their work in Classroom. While teachers will be able to share links with their students across different platforms.

Classroom will also support 10 additional Indian languages, and 54 languages in total, globally. And for better functioning with intermittent internet connectivity, Classroom mobile apps will be updated.

The tech giant also introduced a new product – Assignments. It is an app for educators to distribute, analyse and grade student work, and will be part of the learning management system.

Google said both Classroom, and Assignments can access originality reports to review classwork for potential plagiarism. In addition, G Suite Enterprise for Education customers will be able to use originality reports to also check for potential plagiarism among students in their school.