Google has announced its new initiative called Anywhere School to boost online learning. As part of this initiative, it will be rolling out over 50 new features across Meet, Classroom, G Suite and other products.

The tech giant also detailed a range of new features to Google Meet and Google Classroom to help educators with online learning.

Google Meet

Google is extending the participant limit in a tiled view for Meet accommodating up to 49 students at once.

It has also added new moderation features for Education meetings that will be rolled out in September. As part of the new controls, moderators will be able to prohibit participants from joining meetings after they’ve been ejected or after they’ve been denied entry twice. This feature will be launched by the end of this month.

They will be able to end meetings for all participants, manage to join requests easily and in bulk, disable in-meeting chat, restrict participants that can be present in a session and lock meetings until the moderator joins.

It will add new engagement features for students. Educators can utilize a new collaborative whiteboard with Jamboard integration in Meet. The video platform will also support attendance tracking.

Educators can blur or replace backgrounds and also enable a low-lighting mode on the platform.

Later this year, features such as hand-raising and Q&A updates will also be added to Meet.

It will also launch a new temporary recordings feature later this year, “Which will be available to all Education customers for free (premium recordings will still be part of G Suite Enterprise for Education).”

“With this new feature, any meeting host will be able to record a meeting and share the recording within their domain for up to 30 days before the video expires. They will not be able to share the recording outside their domain or download it,” Google explained in an official blog post.

Google Classroom

Google will make its Classroom tool more accessible by adding more languages for the interface.

“We’ll be launching Classroom in 10 additional languages, including Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Urdu. Soon Classroom will support over 54 languages globally,” Google said.

It will also make it easier for students to join classes. Educators can now share a link to join classes with a single click on platforms such as WhatsApp.

It will add a to-do widget for students and a to-review widget for teachers on the Classes pages.

The tool will also make it easier for teachers to flag plagiarism by students through its ‘originality reports’ feature.

“We’re raising the number of originality reports that educators can use per class from three to five. (Educators with G Suite Enterprise for Education licenses will continue to get unlimited originality reports.) Educators will also be able to print, save and download reports to share with students, parents and administrators. Soon educators and students will be able to run originality reports on Google Slides, in addition to Google Docs, as well as in multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Indonesian and Italian,” Google said.

Other features added to the Classroom include student engagement metrics and deeper integration with other teaching tools by Google.

It has also improved offline support on Classroom mobile app.

“We’re working to update the Classroom mobile apps to work much better even with intermittent connectivity,” Google said.

It is also working on integrated tools to make it easier for educators to create and manage courses at scale.

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