Back in May Google first announced a preview of Classroom, a free tool that makes it easier for teachers to stay in touch with students in and outside of the classroom. Yesterday, the company made it available for anyone with a Google Apps for Education account.
Classroom knits together various Google services like Drive, Docs, and Gmail to offer a unified system that teachers can use to create and collect assignments, quickly see the progress of work, provide real-time feedback to students, make announcements, and more.
Teachers can create a class page, and manually add students to it, or share a code using which students can add themselves to the page. Once the setup is ready, teachers can create assignments, attach files from Google Drive, as well as choose to automatically make a copy for the whole class, with each student’s name appended to the name of the file.
Since the preview was released, more than 100,000 teachers from over 45 countries signed up to take a look, providing feedback that helped shape the product. "We’ve also heard that educators want a simple place to post information and materials about their classes, so we added an ‘About’ page for each course as well”, said Google Classroom Product Manager Zach Yeskel in a blog post.
Classroom is available in 42 languages and works well on mobile devices and most popular screen readers.
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