Google Classroom
As a former high school math teacher, I know all too well that teachers spend a ton of valuable time doing things other than teaching—waking up early to grade quizzes, collecting and returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine paper jams. But with today’s technology it doesn’t have to be this way. Many teachers and professors have found ways to use technology to be better educators and avoid busy work. We spent the past year working closely with many educators to understand the systems they use to simplify their workloads, so they can get back to doing what they love—teaching.
Today, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Day, we’re announcing a preview of Classroom, a new, free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. It helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. Classroom is based on the principle that educational tools should be simple and easy to use, and is designed to give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn.
With Classroom, you'll be able to:
Create and collect assignments:
Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
Improve class communications:
Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
Stay organized:
Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page. We know that protecting your students’ privacy is critical. Like the rest of our Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.European Students and Employers Seek More Web-Development MOOCs
Students, education providers, and employers call massive open online courses one of the best ways to learn web-development skills, according to a report [archive.org, 20160401] released on Thursday by the European Commission.
The report, which drew on a survey of about 3,000 people, including 731 students, said that only one student in four was not familiar with MOOCs and that about 64 percent of the respondents had taken such courses.
Web-development courses appeared to be in high demand but were not always easy to find online. According to the report, only 56 MOOCs teach such skills throughout Europe, compared with 115 in the United States.
Most employers surveyed, including corporate managers, developers, and human-resources staff members, said MOOCs could help close a skills gap in web design. “They stressed the fact that in the current market it is especially difficult to find employees with domain-specific skills, iOS, Android, and HTML5 experts,” the report said.
For the most part, respondents rated MOOCs as more effective than colleges in teaching such skills.
The commission is the European Union’s executive body.