Google announces new Digital Education tool ‘Assignments’

The search engine giant Google has announced new education tools for teachers and students to facilitate learning in the virtual education space. This feature will be available with all the products of Google such as Meet, G Suite and Classroom.

Highlights of the Tool

This new tool will have some of the features rolled out in the coming months whereas the rest of the features will be available later this year. In this platform, a larger titled view with up to 49 participants and a collaborative whiteboard with Jam-board have been made available in Google Meet.

In order to ensure more privacy, blurred backgrounds will be introduced in Meet in October. The attendance tracking during virtual sessions and breakout rooms, so a class can be split into smaller groups for simultaneous discussions, will be available very soon, as part of G Suite Enterprise for Education.

In order to help the students ask questions, a hand-raising feature will be introduced in Meet, this year and also a new Q&A and polling feature to engage students will be coming to G Suite Enterprise for Education.

All education customers will be able to use temporary recordings feature, coming later this year, to record a meeting and share that within their domain for up to 30 days.

Background

Google announced $10 billion towards education in India in the next five years and the company will also train more than 1 million teachers in the country within 2020 offering a range of free tools such as G Suite for Education, Google Classroom and YouTube to help digitize the education experience in the nation. As part of this, Google has tied up with CBSE and Maharashtra government also for digitizing the education space in the country.

Month: Current Affairs - August, 2020