Months after students and academicians across schools and colleges struggled to upload and submit assignments as pictures, Google has launched a new feature in the camera app that corrects the uploaded images for clarity. This is part of over 50+ features set to be rolled out as part of educational tools offered by the tech giant.
Google told indianexpress.com that the offline feature was introduced after getting feedback from educators in India. Google claims over 320 million students across India have used its teaching tools in 2020.
Meanwhile, the ‘Teach from Anywhere Hub’ was extended to local languages and has gained traction among over nine lakh people in India. In the past year, over five lakh teachers have attended webinars and other training offered by Google in partnership with CBSE, Kendriya Vidyalaya, and the education ministries of Maharashtra and Delhi.
This Avni Shah, vice president, product management, Google said is in line with the tech giant’s vision of offering real-time insights to students while learning. “With more AI and ML-powered technologies we aim at giving insights to every child in terms of where s/he struggles, and how to resolve those issues all in real-time. We aim to build a system with proactive insights on learning outcomes. Work towards it has already begun in form of a read-along app which gives feedback on every word, and building a virtual agent to help universities elevate graduates of some of their students,” she said.
Read | What did India’s e-learning boost mean for tech giants?
Stating that Google has seen how different users behave differently across the world, she said in India there has been a demand for regional language as well as a mobile-first approach in using tech-enabled tools was a big sector. The offline mode is one such offering to help areas and communities with no or less access.
Other features added to Google Classroom include improved mobile grading, and classroom add-on feature which allows direct integration of a third-party edtech tool or platform to the classroom. Google Meets too will have several features including access for multiple moderators, mute all, and end meeting for all features.
Under the new upgrade, teachers will have more control in their online classes which includes syncing roasters across sessions, improve student engagement tracking where teachers will get to know when was a student active last, or what was their last comment in the classroom, etc.
For institutions, Google is introducing three new paid editions: Google Workspace for Education Standard, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Google Workspace for Education Plus (formerly G Suite Enterprise for Education).
