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Google rolled out a slew of new features for its education products to support learning as the pandemic accelerated the use of technology for education.
The California-based tech giant said in a blog post it would like to unveil more than 50 new features to Google Workspace, Classroom, Meet, Chrome OS and others.
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To start with, Google has updated the G Suite for Education to Google Workspace for Education and has renamed its free edition G Suite for Education to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals.
Google moved away from its original storage policy that offered unlimited storage to qualifying schools and universities. The new policy will provide schools and universities with a baseline of 100 TB of cloud storage. Google said it would be enough for over 100 million docs, 8 million presentations or 400,000 hours of video. The policy will come into effect in July 2022.
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Google noted that 150 million students and educators are involved with Google Classroom and now the company is rolling out new features over the next year. With the new add-ons option, Classroom will allow teachers to choose their favourite EdTech tools and content, and assign it to students inside Classroom directly without extra log-ins.
Admins will be able to create classes and populate sync rosters directly to Classroom from their Student Information System. The new Streamline grade entry will let teachers track grades and push them from Classroom’s gradebook.
Some features for admins include, Classroom audit logs and analysing classroom activity logs to keep an eye on students and get insights on classroom engagement.
Google Classroom will also house student engagement tracking, updating Classroom Android to improve ways to let students work offline, review assignments and submit homework pictures easily.
New features for Google Meet
To give teachers more control over their online classrooms, Google Meet has added the ability to end meetings for everyone and the option to quickly mute everyone at once. Educators will also have access to controls like who can join their meetings or use the chat or share their screen, directly from their iOS or Android devices.
Later this year, meetings will support multiple hosts, meaning multiple teachers can partner and help others facilitate the class and share the workload.
Additionally, Google is adding emoji reactions in Meet this year. The app will also work better with low bandwidth internet connectivity for students with weaker internet connections.