Google has announced that it will be improving its Classroom offering, bringing more tools and better integration to its service. Google Classroom add-ons will allow educators to better take advantage of tools, making it even easier to teach in a digital environment. Prior to the world changing, cloud-based video conferencing platforms like Zoom weren't that big of a deal. Today, things are different, with large offices, schools, small businesses, and even friends and family huddling together interacting screen to screen. So it only make sense that companies would invest more so that platforms can evolve.

Classroom partners

In order to accomplish this massive and ambitious integration, Google partnered with 18 companies so that educators can offer add-ons in their classrooms. That means seamlessly being able to assign a game like Kahoot!, making use of resources from Wordwall, or pulling content from Genially, without having to leave the Classroom environment. The three mentioned are just a small sample of partners, but you can check out the full list of participants in the card above.

Furthermore, EDTTech tools can also help to make the experience more seamless by removing the small roadblocks like remembering passwords, browsing external websites, grading work, and more. By taking advantage of add-ons partners, teachers and students alike can access what they need from one point of contact. There are even tools that make grading easier, like an auto-grading feature, grade syncing, and also student insights.

In order to get started, educators will need to rely on their admins. Administrators will be required to setup add-ons, enabling the the option for educators. Educators will need to have Google Workspace for Education Plus or Teaching & Learning Upgrade for Google Education in order to take advantage of the aforementioned perks. These feature were announced back in June but is now currently being rolled out. The service as a whole will be available globally, but add-ons could have restrictions dependent on their location.

Google has done an excellent job strengthening its cloud-based video conferencing platform, not only for consumers, but also educators. This isn't the first such update to Google's Classroom, with the firm adding offline tools to its platform late last year. We can only hope that things will continue to grow.

Source: Google