Google continues to enhance its software for Google Classroom, an app that helps teachers with basic classroom tasks and organization. 

The upgrade comes "a week after rival Microsoft launched a similar classroom assistance application for Office 365 education customers," said an PCWorld.com. "It’s meant to be a tool that helps teachers with basic tasks, such as creating and organizing assignments, providing feedback and communicating with students. Classroom also provides a section for teachers to post information about their classes."

Google has now integrated Classroom with Google groups, the article said, "so that discussion groups can be pre-populated with class rosters, when used in conjunction with the Google Apps School Directory Sync." Another new feature, "lets teachers download grades for all assignments at once."

"The upgrade also gives teachers more controls over their Classroom domain, such as allowing or forbidding students from posting or commenting in the class’ collective activity stream," the article said. "A new option lets students mark as completed assignments that don’t involve submitting work to the teacher, such as watching a video or reading a document."

On the Official Google for Work blog, Google launched "five improvements for the classroom", including marking assignments as "done."

"Not all assignments require students to submit work online - like reading a chapter or conducting an experiment - so we've added the ability for students to simply mark assignments as 'done' if there's nothing to turn in," said blogger Madhav Bhagat. "We've also given the Assignments page a refresh, to make it easier for students to keep track of upcoming work."

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Article by Kassondra Granata, EducationWorld Contributor