Google wants to help improve education and they’re doing their part in the classroom. Today among the rest of the announcements at the Intel live stream, Google Classroom(appropriately named) was announced to help teachers get organized and more easily create classroom curriculum and learning plans for their students. I think we can all agree that students education is a hugely important part in the countries growth, and teachers are on the front lines. Google Classroom is also in part a celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week, but the benefits of it will carry on long past once this day is over.
The new tool can help teachers not only arrange curriculum and assignments, but they can also use the new tool to communicate with students and give feedback on schoolwork. Google Classroom is free tool within the Google Apps For Education initiative, and with the help of Google Docs and Gmail teachers can utilize it to complete these tasks. Google took some of the feedback from various teachers and students around the nation that use Google Apps for Education in their classrooms, and they used that knowledge to make Apps for Education even better by developing and introducing Classroom to make things simpler and lighten the load for teachers.
Classroom aims to not only make things easier for teachers and give them an organized way to create learning plans and give feedback to students, but also to allow them more time in the classroom to actually teach. In most classrooms teachers get about 45 minutes of time at best to teach and get a message through to students, and Classroom will help them maximize the time that they have and put more effort towards the students. Google Apps for Education is already a big win for students too, as it allows them to keep track of all their assignments for everything right in one easy to access place. Now with Google Classroom in the picture, Apps for Education is bound to get even more interesting and we have to wonder if it will help more schools hop on board with the program.