Education platform has 30 million submitted assignments.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Google Classroom was initially released last year, but it’s always relied on the web for its functionality. But Wednesday, over six months and 30 million submitted assignments later, the educational platform is finally available for Android and iOS.
Google’s Classroom mobile app supplements the traditional teaching environment with a utilitarian, digital flair. The app affords a host of tools to enhance learning environments; students are able to take photos with their phone cameras and attach them to assignments directly, share images and PDFs with other apps, and automatically cache their work so it’s available offline.
Google Classroom seeks to provide a catalyst for students and teachers to bridge the perceived technology gap in order to aid pupils and educators alike in schools across the world. The platform works seamlessly with Drive and all of Google’s other cloud-based services, and also allows teachers to make announcements, follow students’ progression through lesson plans in real-time, and distribute assignments in a paperless fashion. Students will likewise be able to check what’s due on an online assignments page and then turn in their work electronically.
One particularly poignant feature provided by Classroom is the ability for students to “archive” classes. As Google elaborates in an official blog post, “archiving a class will remove it from the home page and make it read-only,” meaning teachers and class members can still view archived classes. Classroom’s archiving feature will essentially create a searchable database of past lessons that can continue to serve as an academic resource far past the expiration date of any given course.
In a departure from its usual business model, Google Classroom does not contain any advertisements. Furthermore, it is completely free to use for the faculty and students of any academic institution. The official product page can be found here.