Google is making life easier for students, teachers and parents this back-to-school season with a few updates to Google Classroom and Expeditions — updates that deserve an A+.
In June, Tech Times reported some new Google for Education tools to help empower educators and inspire learning in students. This month, Google is taking education "beyond classroom walls" and going mobile, allowing everyone to access (and doodle on!) learning materials, go on exciting adventures, and stay on top of class requirements through email notifications.
Here are the nifty updates to Google Classroom and the exciting new adventures on Google Expeditions.
1. Google Classroom Email Summaries
A new feature in Google Classroom will now enable parents or guardians to keep track of a child's homework and other class activities through online summaries. Teachers can invite the parent or guardian to receive weekly or daily updates on what is going on in school, turning each class into its own online community where parents can participate actively.
From posting test results to announcing homework and other school projects, the email summaries will not only keep students in the loop but will also involve parents in the overall monitoring of their child's performance.
These Google Classroom summaries go hand in hand with the most recent update to Inbox by Gmail, which now groups together important notifications into smart clusters for easy tracking.
2. Google Classroom Whiteboard And Annotation Tool
Students sometimes learn better, and express themselves more clearly, when writing things down in longhand or scribbling down diagrams and formulae in freehand. One study shows that writing ideas down with a pen and paper allows students to process information in their own words.
Today, students and teachers can make good use of this age-old learning technique of jotting down ideas fast (instead of simply typing up notes) thanks to Google Classroom's new annotation tool. This doodle functionality lets students answer questions in freehand, and highlight important text in different colors.
"Using annotations, students can complete assignments, sketch out math problems or even create visuals of creative ideas directly on their devices," write Dina Kachintseva and Felix Wang of Google. Kachintseva is a software engineer for Classroom while Wang is a user experience designer. With their teams, they have given students a "portable classroom whiteboard" to sketch and write notes on, whether the students are at home, in class or even on the school bus.
3. Beyond The Classroom: Google Expeditions
Apart from refreshing the Google Classroom app, Google is making sure classroom learning is deeply immersive, vivid and memorable with Google Expeditions.
Equipped with the Google Cardboard, students can now go on field trips to almost any corner of the planet through the virtual reality / augmented reality-based Google Expeditions program.
With more than 200 adventures on offer, a class simply dons the Cardboard headset and embarks on these VR/AR field trips "from Machu Picchu to Antarctica to the International Space Station" and even inside the human body.
