Google Classroom earns 'extra credit' with new features

One of the most important -- yet thankless -- jobs in the world is being a teacher. Many educators are underpaid and under-appreciated. In some underfunded districts, teachers are forced to make do without essentials, like books and pencils -- a really sad state of affairs.

Luckily, technology is constantly improving and evolving, which translates to new solutions and tools for educators. One such brilliant solution is Google Classroom. The search-giant's education-focused organizational tool can make a teacher's life much easier -- especially when paired with a Chromebook and Google Docs. Today, Classroom is earning some extra credit in the eyes of educators with all new features that make it even better.

"We built Classroom to save teachers time, and we know that grading is one of those tasks that can involve a lot of little time wasters. In fact, students have turned in more than 200 million assignments via Classroom to date, which adds up to a lot of grading hours. Today, we’re launching new features to help make grading a little faster and easier", says Anibal Chehayeb, Google Classroom Software Engineer.

Chehayeb further explains, "we've polished the look and feel of Classroom on the web with icons to help differentiate items in the stream and added a cleaner look for comments and replies. We've also recently updated our Android and iOS mobile apps, so they'll now load even faster. You can post questions for students on the go, and Android teachers can reuse previous posts".

Classroom gains a bunch of new features, including improvements to grading, like sorting grades by student name. It is surprising that this ability was not available from the start, but it is very welcome now.

While the ability to use grade scales other than 100 point was possible, apparently many teachers could not find the setting. Google has made the option more obvious. The search-giant has also added keyboard commands -- use of up and down arrows -- to more easily navigate.

The most important update, however, is the ability to export directly to Google Sheets. Before, it was necessary to save a .csv file and then upload to Sheets. Now, educators can cut out that middle step and open grades directly in Google's web-based spreadsheet solution.

Google deserves major kudos for continually improving its Classroom solution. While some companies trot out fluff as updates, these are all very useful -- sometimes it is the little things that make the biggest impact.

Are you a teacher that leverages Google Classroom? Are you excited by these new features? Tell me in the comments.

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