Google for Education has been updated with several new features that can help students as well as parents. The updates come just in time for the start of school this year.
In Google for Education's official blog, it was reported that Google Classroom now has a feature that will automatically share summaries of student work with parents. Having received an invite, parents and guardians can receive automated daily or weekly email summaries of student work as well as class announcements.
"I enjoy helping my children prepare for assignments that they have coming up - and the earlier I know about them, the better," Michelle Barrette, a mother of five students from Medfield, Massachusetts, said. "This way I can prevent them from missing deadlines and see if they need help brainstorming topics or solutions."
Another new feature gives users the ability to annotate documents in the Google Classroom mobile app. With this, students can complete assignments, draw a sketch for math problems as well as create visuals of creative ideas by just using their mobile devices.
For teachers, annotations can be used to grade assignments quickly by writing on the student's work. Another use for it can be to highlight important passages in a text or novel.
"They highlighted all the ideas they thought were convincing arguments in one color, and all the ideas they disagreed with in another color," Anne Farrahar, an English teacher in the Medfield Public Schools district, said about how her class used the feature. "This gave me the chance to assess students' individual understanding and, based on their responses, gather ideas for future lessons."
Moreover, Google aims to bring students further than what they can see through virtual field trips with Expeditions. With just a Google Expeditions kit, students can have an adventure to places which were once difficult to go to.
Other new features include a more organized Classroom, the ability to share screens wirelessly at school, images for Google Forms and Inbox by Gmail for Google for Education users.
