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Google’s new courses help teachers seeking to integrate its services into the classroom

3 themes for blog

Google wants schools to take advantage of its Apps for Education suite of productivity tools and services, but it also recognizes that proper professional development is essential to enabling educators and transforming education. The company today announced the release of a free training platform that provides interactive lessons with a focus on how to successfully complete real classroom tasks and objectives using Google products.

The new platform is called Google for Education Training Center and builds upon a recent survey by the American Federation of Teachers which found that 71% of educators and administrators surveyed cited “adoption of new initiatives without proper training or professional development” as a primary source of stress in their work lives. The new tools are supposed to help teachers apply Google’s tools in the classroom and beyond.

The lessons, like how to get students collaborating using Drive and Docs, are organized around the three themes above and range in difficulty from beginner courses to those targeted at teachers who already know their way around Google’s products quite well but might inspiration on how to differently using the products with their students.

As part of the announcement, Google says that it has brought on the Chicago Public Schools, a school district including over 600 schools and 400,000 students, as a launch partner for the Training Center. The district will use Training Center as a part of its technology professional development program, and the course will count towards its teachers’ professional development hours.

“The Training Center reflects what we value most about education, focusing on the process of learning rather than the tools themselves,” the company says. More information about the Training Center and to try the lessons, Apps for Education customers can visit g.co/edutrainingcenter.

Google Drive for Work and Apps for Education getting plethora of new security features

Google Drive for Work: Secure sharing - YouTube 2015-03-31 12-28-58

Google has today announced that it’s bringing new sharing controls, alerts and “audit events” to both Google Drive for Work and Google for Education over the coming weeks. Security is one of the biggest concerns that companies have about moving their data to the cloud, and Google hopes these new features will help make the transition just a little bit easier…


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Google releases Classroom mobile apps for Android and iOS

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Google announced today that it’s releasing mobile apps for its Google Classroom service for both Android and iOS devices. The company officially launched Classroom to its Apps for Education customers in the US during the summer offering them a web-based platform for planning lessons, handing out assignments, and working alongside students. Teachers and students will now be able to access those features from mobile devices through the new apps and Google is also adding a could of new features to the platform.

In addition to a new teacher assignments page and archiving functions for Classroom, Google notes that the mobile apps will let users snap a photo to share or attach to assignments, share content from other apps, and access content cached for offline viewing.
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Google Classroom gets Groups integration, improved teacher controls & more

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Google just announced some enhancements and new features rolling out to its Google Classroom service today including much improved controls for teachers. Google Classroom, a platform for teachers to plan lessons, assignments, and work alongside students in real-time, was announced earlier this year and first opened to all Apps for Education users in August.
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Google launches Drive for Education with free unlimited storage and file encryption

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Today, Google announced Drive for Education, a new part of its Apps for Education platform that will offer unlimited storage. Similar to Drive for Work, Drive for Education supports individual file sizes of up to 5TB, along with automatic encryption. “Every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers,” wrote 


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Google Classroom now available to all Apps for Education users, adds collaboration features

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After announcing a preview of “Google Classroom” back in May, today Google has opened up the tool for educators to all Google Apps for Education users. Classroom offers teachers a slick platform to plan lessons, assignments, and work alongside students, and today Google also announced some new features its implemented on advice from educators that have been previewing the software. Google is adding new collaboration tools that allow teachers to work with students while they work on assignments:
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