Your Google for Education Guide for Back to School

New tools in Classroom and G Suite

Google Classroom is getting its biggest refresh yet. We’ve added a Classwork page to help teachers and students stay more organized. With Classwork, teachers can easily group assignments into units or modules, and reorder work to match their class sequence. We’re also introducing a new grading tool, which lets educators quickly toggle between student submissions when grading, and save commonly used feedback. The tool improves the grading workflow, so that educators have more time to spend personalizing feedback. Finally, we’ve made it easier to setup classes and manage information. Read more here, and check out the Back to School 2018 FAQs for full details.

In addition to using a Learning Management System (LMS), many schools use G Suite to collaborate. Until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to integrate G Suite with many LMSs. That’s why we introduced Course Kit in July, a free toolkit that allows instructors to use Google Docs and Drive to collect assignments, give faster and richer feedback to students, and share course materials within the LMS they’re already using. It’s built using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard so it’s easy to set up and works with all LMSs that support LTI. If your institution uses G Suite for Education, you can get started by requesting access to the beta.

We heard from educators and students it can be challenging to format in Google Docs when writing and assigning papers. That’s why we’re sharing new Docs updates focused on margins and indentations to improve the overall writing experience, especially when making MLA style citations. Now, you can use hanging indents and set specific indentations using a dialog box. Be on the lookout for customizable header and footer margins, and a vertical ruler coming to Docs this fall.