This past August, Google released new improvements to Google Classroom, just in time for the new school year. The changes include a major redesign of the stream setup and a new page.

No more scrolling down the stream looking for a specific assignment from previous units—Google Classroom now has a tab dedicated for classwork in order to make the lives of teachers and students much more easier!

The classwork page allows teachers to group assignments under specific topics, which makes it a much simpler way to navigate certain posts. Teachers can organize classwork based on the units they teach and rearrange the order of each assignment and topics. Previously, Google Classroom had setup of having assignments, announcements, and homework all placed together in chronological order on the stream.

Google Classroom still keeps all assignments posted on the stream, but now focusses more on class announcements as well as assignments. In order to see what attachments your teacher assigned to you, students now have to physically click onto the assignment post and are then taken to a tab where they can view all the attachments to that specific assignment.

Google also introduced a new grading workflow for teachers so that accessing work from students can be easily moved from file to file. Previously, teachers had to open documents from each student separately but now can more efficiently switch from one student document to another. This speeds up the grading process of a teacher tremendously.

In addition, being able to switch from one document to another, teachers can now also display individual student’s grades to assignments directly on the post making it easier for students to know their grade rather than going on to Powerschool. Within the work document, teachers can post private comments and create a comment bank that contains the teacher’s most frequently used comments for future use.

Overall the updates made to Google Classroom are not as drastic in any way and after a couple, students and teachers will be get use to the changes.