Google Classroom Launches Today: More teaching, Less tech-ing

Back in May, when Google introduced Classroom, they asked educators to give it a try. The response was fascinating—with more than 100,000 educators from more than 45 countries signed up for a preview. Today, they’re starting to open Classroom to all users of Google Apps for Education, help teachers to spend more time to teach and less time shuffling papers.

Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn, New York, was one of the first schools to use Classroom. Sister Rosemarie DeLoro, who has been teaching for more than 60 years, had never used computers in her class before Classroom introduced to her at school. With Classroom, she now finds easy to assign digital worksheets to students in her Italian class and provide direct feedback to help them learn. In fact, Sister Rosemarie was showing the other teachers how to use it after just a few weeks.

Teachers and students are important in helping Google builds Classroom. For example, they heard during the preview that educators don’t to wait until an assignment is turned in to collaborate with students. Teachers can view and comment on students’ work to help them along the way with Classroom. They’ve also heard that educators want a simple place to post information and materials about their classes, so they also added an “About” page for each course.

When teachers make assignments, they will be able to attach files from Google Drive — including Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Keynote, Google Slides, Excel, Google Sheets, and many others — then choose to automatically make a copy for each student.

Reviewing task becomes much easier with Google Classroom

Teachers can review assignments from Classroom and provide feedback and grades to students all in one place.

Google Classroom is now available in 42 languages (inclusive of right-to-left-ones, such as Hebrew, Arabic and Persian). It also operates well on mobile devices and most popular screen readers. Every day they’ll be rolling out to more users, so if you go to classroom.google.com with your Apps for Education account and haven’t had any access yet, just check back soon.

Classroom will help you lessen time at the photocopier and give you more time doing what you love—teaching.