Students to never miss homework again with Google Classroom

7 May 2014

To mark Teacher Appreciation Day on 6 May in the US, Google has launched a preview of Classroom, a free organisational tool kit for teachers to organise students’ work.

The new software will be included in the Google Apps for Education suite and, according to a post on the Google blog, Classroom “helps teachers create and organise assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease”.

The software uses a combination of Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to better interact with students and, perhaps to the annoyance of students, will mean there will be no excuse for getting a pass on doing homework if they can’t make it into school.

So far, Classroom has been tested in a number of pilot schools in the US and is now being released as a preview to students and teachers who sign up for Classroom. A selection of those individuals will begin testing the software’s capabilities by next month.

Other features of the education tool include the ability for teachers to make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real-time, thereby improving communication inside and outside of class. Drive folders can also be created for each assignment and for each student.

Classroom is due for general release at no cost in September.

Students with tablets image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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