“The initiative, which the Mountain View giant initially launched almost two years ago, essentially leverages visual data from Maps and Earth to generate 3D models of the total amount of sunlight that reaches your roof.” – The Next Web
Check out Google’s blog post for full details.
“Classroom is a new, free tool coming to Google Apps for Education that helps teachers easily and quickly create and organize assignments, provide feedback, and communicate with their classes” (Source). “Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease…it lets students organize their work, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers” (Source).
The following video highlights the experiences of some of the teachers and students who provided feedback as Google developed Classroom.
Easy to Set up
Teachers can add students directly or share a code with their class to join. It takes just minutes to set up.
Saves Time
The simple, paperless assignment workflow allows teachers to create, review, and grade assignments quickly, all in one place.
Improves Organization
Students can see all of their assignments on an assignments page, and all class materials are automatically filed into folders in Google Drive.
Enhances Communication
Classroom allows teachers to send announcements and questions instantly. Since students can post to the stream, they can help out their classmates.
Affordable and Secure
Like the rest of our Google Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.
Learn more: http://google.com/edu/classroom
I’m excited about being a part of this. I hope you can join us!
We invite you to join us for the first annual Google Apps for Education Southern Summit in Atlanta, Georgia on September 22 and 23, 2012. This high intensity two day event focuses on deploying, integrating and using Google Apps for Education to promote student learning in K-12 and higher education. The program features Google Certified Teachers, Google Apps for Education Certified Trainers, practicing administrators, solution providers, Google engineers, and representatives from the Google Apps for Education team.
Sessions include two keynote presentations, plus two full days of informative breakouts, cutting-edge demonstrations, and hands-on workshops led by experienced and knowledgeable professional developers.
The Google Apps for Education Southern Summit will be in Atlanta, near the area’s most popular attractions.
Register now to take advantage of the early bird rates.
I’ve been working a lot with Google’s many, many services the past several weeks in conjunction with various professional development workshops that I have/will be facilitating. In doing so, I’ve become a big fan of their products. I’ve especially been struck by their tools’ ease of use, deep integration among tools and services, and Google’s commitment to openness. I’m going to be saving a lot of money on software in the future as I migrate away from some of the expensive software giants that I’ve used for a long time and in lieu of Google’s free and similar/superior offerings.
In the past few days I’ve noticed that the new Google toolbar (the dark box across the top) has pretty much gone live across all the Google services I use. Google has never been known for their graphic design prowess, but I’d say the update is an improvement. I especially dig the redesign of the Google Docs interface.
