Google Education, a flood of news: What are the changes in GSuite, Classroom, and Meet

A train arrives loaded with news on Google’s educational platform: To give the news is the company itself, which just published a blog post on the topic, and also announced 40 new blogs Chromebook Designed for teaching.

The news covers different areas, from G Suite to Classroom to Meet, and it is quite a lot. It will be implemented in the coming months Or anyway by the end of 2021, but we can start looking at it on paper at least. Here they are below.

Grandma’s first concerns G Suite for Education, Which becomes more flexible and changing the name. It will be called Google workspace For educationIt will still include all the products already used today, such as Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Presentations, but to meet different usage needs, it will be available in four distinct versions, which will replace the two versions, the currently available versions, which are the free version and the Enterprise edition.

Obviously, the free version will remain It will be called education The basics: It won’t see any concessions compared to the current free waiver, but rather it will get some new features. Instead there will be a copy Education standard Equipped with advanced analytical and security tools for more control, visibility and information.

Both can be added Un-upgrade Teaching and learning, With advanced video conferencing features in Google Meet (up to 250 participants, or live broadcasts of up to 10,000 viewers), additional third-party tools built directly into Classroom (like Adobe or Kahoot!), And the ability to create scalable courses with Models and identification of potential plagiarism.

Finally, there is a more complete version, This is called Education Plus It includes all the other options tools, and other additional features, such as the institute’s Cloud Search tool, another 20 GB of storage space per paid license, plus 100 terabytes of shared pool, and the ability to live stream to a maximum of 100,000 spectators.

Also new features for Google Classroom, Which was used in February 2021 by 150 million students and teachers (40 million a year ago): It will be possible to better understand each student’s commitment and class thanks to Special tracking tool Which will show the last login, last job posted and last written comment, but also use Classroom offline for all students with limited contact (initially, this feature will only be available on Android).

Since it was found that Many students prefer to do their homework in a notebook rather than a computerThe ability to take and send photos to Classroom has also been improved for mobile users, starting with Android. On the part of teachers, there are also improvements to the inclusion and export of scores from mobile devices, and richer text formatting. On the side of the system administrator, it will also be possible to have an audit log in the admin console complete with activities and data.

The news is also invested Google Meet (by the way, here’s how to check audio and video before the meeting), Used for video lessons. In this area, visibility and control tools have been improved, including the ability to set specific criteria for who can participate in video calls. End the meeting for all participants and mute everyone at the same time.

There will be no time limits for meetings and Students will not be able to reconnect to a meeting if the teacher leaves the virtual classroom; Teachers will be able to introduce moderators to participate in the virtual lesson, and copies of lessons will be obtained.

Meet will work better at low bandwidth, to give students with poor internet connections the ability to continue following classes; Emoji will also be offeredTo allow students to interact gently without disturbing the lesson. During 2020, Google hosted 3 billion minutes of video calling, and Every day Meet hosts 1,300 years of lectures.

It will also be launched Learn with Google Arts & Culture-Dedicated portal for teachers, parents and students Which brings together the stories, knowledge and treasures of 2000 cultural institutions, as well as interactive tools such as augmented reality and machine learning that will help make learning more engaging, fun and stimulating.

Will be available Resources and lessons developed by experts in the field of educationOn the subject of music, art, history, literature, chemistry, biology, natural history, geography, and beyond; Interactive tools aim to make lessons more comprehensive by using Augmented and Virtual RealityAnd machine learning and 3D models.