At the The Anywhere School event held online earlier, Zach Yeskel, a product manager for Google for Education who has a teaching background, revealed that various features of Google for Education will be used to help more students learn courses through online connections during this epidemic, while also making it easier for teachers to monitor the listening status of students taking remote classes at home.
After previously opening up many features that were originally only available in G Suite subscription services to general users, Google has recently begun releasing multiple updates for the education version of G Suite services, making it easier for students to continue learning at home through the Internet. At the same time, teachers can also teach through online virtual methods and ensure that students are in class.
In this update, Google plans to increase the capacity of the education version of Google Meet to 9 people in September, increase the display size, and integrate the Jamboard digital whiteboard, allowing teachers and students to interact and collaborate via the Internet.
In addition, this update also adds the ability for the meeting host to automatically become the first participant in each meeting and ensure that the meeting control permissions can be ended. It also prohibits text chat during the meeting, allowing teachers to fully control the teaching process conducted through Google Meet and avoid students obtaining meeting hosting permissions and causing trouble.
It is expected that custom background and background blur features will be available in October to ensure privacy during classes through the Google Meet service. For G Suite Enterprise Education users, group discussion areas and attendance records will be launched to allow teachers to further ensure student interaction and participation during class.
Before the end of this year, the raise-hand question function will be available to all users, and online Q&A and voting functions will be launched for G Suite Enterprise Education users. A new temporary recording function will also be provided, allowing all Education Edition users to record class content through this function.
At the same time, in the Google Classroom section, a to-do function has been added to the course page, allowing students to more easily confirm the next, previously completed, or missed tasks, and also confirm the grading results given by the teacher. Teachers can also share course content with students in the form of a web link, allowing students to quickly participate in the course by clicking the link, and can confirm whether the student's submitted report assignments are plagiarized through content comparison.
As for languages, Google Classroom will add 10 new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 54, and report assignments will be added in Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Indonesian and Italian.
In order to determine whether students are paying attention during distance learning, Google also provides Data Studio data reporting content in this update, allowing teachers to confirm students' class performance through data analysis such as students' online interactions.
As for whether students attend online classes at home on time, Google emphasizes that parents or guardians can use the previously launched Family Link function to understand the students' learning status. At the same time, in addition to providing many tool resources to allow teachers to become more familiar with these services used to assist online teaching, it also provides parents or guardians with tools to easily understand and understand the students' learning status at home.
Zach Yeskel said that teaching or learning through distance learning does pose many challenges to teachers and students. For example, how can teachers confirm students' class status to ensure the quality of teaching, whether students can more easily learn course content through the Internet, and how can parents and guardians ensure that their children can study safely at home. In fact, Google has put a lot of effort in this and will continue to add more features to the Google for Education service to make it easier for students to learn at home and allow teachers to teach courses in a more efficient way, so as to achieve the goal of learning everywhere in the post-epidemic era.
