Google Classroom calendar integration coming to Chromebooks

At Bett 2024, Google today announced the latest Workspace education features, including a new student-facing Classroom integration on Chromebooks.

Besides getting a calendar when clicking the date in the ChromeOS Shelf, there will soon be a new Google Classroom widget for upcoming assignments on Chromebooks. Students can switch between Due soon, No due date, Missing, and Done, while a tap immediately opens that piece of homework.

Meanwhile, Reading mode is integrating OCR, read aloud text-to-speech, and line-by-line focus “in the next year.” ChromeOS is also getting new, “natural-sounding” TTS over the coming months.

Google today also announced a new Resources tab for Classroom that lets teachers “create, manage and share” practice sets, video activities, and other interactive lessons. Additionally, educators will soon be able to “share links to class templates and Classwork pages to simplify lesson planning.”

Meanwhile, Google is pitching possible Duet AI use cases like “drafting lesson plans in Docs, creating images in Slides, and building project plans in Sheets.”

Another AI feature will create suggested questions for interactive video assignments from YouTube. Other upcoming capabilities include:

• “Later this year, educators will be able to create persistent groups of students in Classroom – a top requested feature we have heard from educators. Teachers can easily assign different content to different students based on each group’s specific needs.”
• The App Hub will be available in more than 10 languages later this year”