Google debuts Classroom, an education platform for teacher-student communication

[Arthur]

Lots of useful new features for Classroom and Drive.

 

New ways to share in Google Drive and Classroom

 

Coming Soon: Trusted Domains

In the next few months, we’ll be adding a “trusted domains” feature that will allow schools to extend Drive sharing and Classroom participation to domains they choose. Schools that have already set up separate domains – for example, one domain for faculty and another for students – will be able to use Classroom. It will be possible for students to join classes in other domains, like high school students taking college classes for advanced credit. You'll also be able to configure your trusted domains for Drive, so you can better control sharing outside of your organization.

 

More changes are rolling out over the next several weeks:

 

Reset passwords quickly and securely

When students and teachers get locked out of their account, we’ve heard that waiting for an IT admin – who often wears many hats within the school – to reset their account can take hours or days away from a busy study schedule. Admins will now be able to allow students and teachers to securely reset their passwords so they don't lose any valuable time waiting.

 

Disable download and printing for Google Docs and everything else in Drive

When what you're sharing is only meant for a few select people, you can keep it for their eyes only by disabling downloading, printing and copying. This option to disable exporting from Drive will be available in the advanced sharing settings for each file, and it works for Docs, Sheets, Slides and any other files in Drive.

 

Set sharing settings by organizational units

If your organization’s users are all in the same domain and you want teachers to be able to share outside the school with parents but only want students to share within the school, you can customize Drive sharing controls based on organizational units.

 

Share outside your organization more easily

When it comes to sharing – whether it’s group projects between students or information about Back to School night shared with parents – you want to make sure that recipients can see it whether they use Drive or not. Now, whoever is receiving that PDF, Google Doc, or video can see it without having to sign-in to their Google account. Admins can turn this on or choose to require recipients to sign-in before they see shared information.

 

Set up custom admin alerts to know when things change

All Google Apps admins can now set up custom alerts for the things they care about, like a suspicious login from an account, and get an alert in the Admin console and through the Admin app on Android and iOS. Admins can set up alerts for all activity in Drive, and see when files are created, edited, printed, downloaded and previewed in Drive.

 

[fiza]

Some good stuff but they still haven't introduced co-tutors for classroom which is what alot of schools want.

[machin05]

Some good stuff but they still haven't introduced co-tutors for classroom which is what alot of schools want.

 

It's becoming a slight concern in that it's obviously not an easy implementation. With the amount of requests for it to be added then surely that they would have done it by now. I'm still hoping...

[Arthur]

Multiple teachers can now be added to classes. At last!

 

https://plus.google.com/+GoogleforEducation/posts/FVx2tmNYivy

 

http://vgy.me/d821vD.gif

Edited April 21, 2015 by Arthur

[machin05]

Yay!! The beginning of the end of Moodle \0/

[ForgotMyPassword]

In my opinion ALL VLE/Learning Platforms will be needing to re-assess their position in light of the growing strength of Classroom. I'll be VERY glad to see the back of Moodle, this is purely my opinion but it's the perfect example of a system designed by administrators that doesn't suit the classroom (I know there are companies that round off the edges and customise so I'm not including them in this). I also think it's a good wakeup call for the likes of Frog/Firefly and that should lead to their products getting better and really trying to innovate rather than introducing 'me too' features or gimmicks that may have been a characteristic of previous development. I do believe there's still a place for premium VLEs *if* they adopt this approach and are responsive to their customers.

 

It helps that we are a GAfE school already but Classroom makes it an even more compelling argument - our current approach is to wait for it to mature and include some of the things that support OUR Academy vision, so we're sticking with our VLE for now. There will need to be a conversation once these features arrive though as the Drive and Docs integration is (naturally) so good! Exciting times.

[caffrey]

Bit of a fight here now, with Edmodo and Google classroom...

[ForgotMyPassword]

I've never really liked the interface of Edmodo - it fulfilled a need but I've never really warmed to how it works...

 

Classroom + Google Drive + Google Docs on a Chromebook or iOS Device will be a real winner I think, especially as the iOS apps have kept improving! I'm pretty impressed with the pace of development from Google - healthy competition from O365 is a factor, I would assume!