Google Classroom

The Google company announced in the spring of 2014 release of the Classroom tool which will help teachers to organize communications with pupils, will simplify preparation of tasks and training. Classroom is integrated with Google Docs, Drive, Gmail and is included into a specialized educational packet of Google Apps for Education along with the calendar, e-mail and other applications.

The interactive service Classroom will allow the teacher when forming a task to select sharing of the document or automatic creation of the copy for each pupil; see who finished task performance and who did not; provide a feedback and ask questions to students in real time both in a class, and out of it. Pupils in an interactive mode can get acquainted with the appeared appointed tasks and materials in folders on Google Drive which are created automatically for each task and each pupil. It is possible to open access to tasks both for group, and pupils separately, in files of test tasks the teacher can leave notes. Communication directly both with the teacher, and with schoolmates is also available to pupils.

The company is going to start by the fall Classroom at the American schools which participate in the Google App For Education program. In several weeks the closed application testing of Classroom for Android will begin. For schools this application will be free, without demonstration of advertizing and use of personal data of students for commercial purposes, is noted on the Classroom page. At the moment it is unknown whether is going Google to open access to the application in other countries.

Google Classroom has several main advantages before other similar solutions. First, it "checked by time" services which are joint within one application. Secondly, large user audience, because of promoting of Android many potential project participants already have all necessary to begin to work with Google Classroom.