Notable new features:
- Google for Education Training Center
- Create and share custom maps in Drive
- New ways to integrate Google Classroom
Create, share, and manage custom maps from Drive
Whether you’re planning your soccer schedule, learning about Lewis and Clark, or mapping your local park, Google My Maps makes it easy to put your world on a custom map. Starting today, you can access My Maps right from Google Drive on your Google Apps account, so it’s even easier to create, find and share your custom maps.
The Google for Education blog has outlined some awesome examples of how educators can take advantage of My Maps, such as coordinating field trips and creating geography lessons.
New ways to integrate with Google Classroom
Starting today, developers can embed the Classroom share button and sign up for the developer preview of the Classroom API. These help developers seamlessly integrate with Classroom in ways that help teachers and students—like letting teachers create assignments directly from Peardeck, Quizlet, Duolingo, PBS and many other favorites.
Below are other Google Classroom additions from the past month:
Classroom API
The Classroom API allows admins to provision and manage classes at scale, and lets developers integrate their applications with Classroom. Until the end of July, a developer preview is available, during which interested admins and developers can sign up for early access. When the preview ends, all Apps for Education domains will be able to use the API, unless the admin has restricted access.
By using the API, admins will be able to provision and populate classes for their teachers, set up tools to sync their Student Information Systems with Classroom, and get basic visibility into which classes are being taught in their domain. The Classroom API also allows other apps to integrate with Classroom.
And if you use Pear Deck, it’s now easy to start an interactive Pear Deck session with any of your Classroom classes. Just click “Invite from Google Classroom,” choose a class and your students will automatically be invited. Pear Deck will always use your current roster of students from Classroom, so you don’t have to keep rosters up to date across apps.
In the Admin Console, admins will be able to restrict whether teachers and students in their domain can authorize apps to access their Google Classroom data. It’s also notable to add that apps aren’t permitted to use Classroom data from the API for any advertising purposes.
Classroom share button
The Classroom share button is a simple way for developers and schools to allow teachers and students to seamlessly assign or turn-in links, videos and images from another webpage or product.
The share button only requires a few lines of JavaScript, and can be customized to meet the needs of your website. When teachers and students click the button, they can quickly share to Classroom without having to leave the site they’re on. Many educational content and tool providers have already committed to integrating the Classroom share button, including:
- PBS
- Quizlet
- American Museum of Natural History
- Discovery Education
- Duolingo
- TIME Edge
Other new Classroom and Google Apps for Education features:
- Re-use previous posts: If you used Classroom this year and want to reuse your assignments or materials in future classes, we’ve got you covered. In August, Google will roll out the ability for you to reuse assignments and posts from old classes. Stay tuned for more details.
- Easier provisioning of Google Apps accounts for your domain: Creating a large number of Google Apps for Education accounts can be challenging. Last week Google introduced a new API to generate available usernames and create Google Apps accounts in your domain: account provisioning for Google Apps. It can be used in a website where users create their own accounts or in a script that creates accounts in bulk.
The new Training Center: professional development by and for educators
To help with the ever-present challenge of professional development, Google has begun offering a new portal for Google Apps training with the debut of “The Training Center.”
The Training Center offers various lessons with a classroom focus, allowing educators and administrators to create their own learning paths by choosing basic or advanced courses. Each course is organized around three themes:
Educators can access different units and lessons in any order they prefer. After completing a course, educators can then distinguish themselves as Google Certified Educators, Level 1 or Level 2, depending on the course level.
The lessons support different skill sets, grade levels, content specialties, capacities and interests. Google notes that The Training Center focuses “on the process of learning rather than the tools themselves. To learn more about the Training Center, visit g.co/edutrainingcenter and try out a lesson yourself.