Google has introduce a new edition to Google Apps for Education, called Google Classroom. If you are using gClassFolders, and Doctopus, Google Classroom may replace these scripts and it may even be a competitor for Hapara.
Here is some information about Google Classroom from Google:
Google Classroom will help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease. Classroom is based on the principle that educational tools should be simple and easy to use, and is designed to give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn.
With Classroom, you'll be able to:
- Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.
- Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.
- Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page.
In addition, Google Classroom will continue to protect student's privacy and will not display ads and never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.
Teachers can apply for a preview of Classroom. Based on the requests we receive, we’ll be inviting a limited number of educators to try Classroom in about a month. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education. Since we want to make sure Classroom plays well with others, if you’re a developer or partner, sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom.
Preview of Classroom:
I know I will be signing up for a preview and have intentions of applying Classroom to our domain in September.