Introducing Your Google for Education Tools

You’re probably already familiar with Google Search, but did you know that Google offers many other tools that are useful in the classroom?

Google Apps for Education is a suite of tools that can help you increase opportunities for critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, all while supporting the learning objectives that you have for your students. These tools are free, ad-free, reliable, and secure. They are already used by millions of students in schools around the world. Of course, free is great, but the best thing is that these tools are relevant to students, easy to use, and open doors to many new ways to learn.

Let’s take a look at the Google Apps for Education suite now, starting with the tool purpose-built for schools – Google Classroom.

Google Classroom is a collaboration tool for teachers and students that helps organize and streamline the classroom experience. With just a few clicks, you can create a class, add your students, and create assignments or announcements. You’ll be able to see who’s completed an assignment, who’s still working on it, and assign grades when it’s finished. You can also instantly offer feedback to students, and see their questions or comments on their assignments.

Google Drive is like an online hard drive where you can store all your files – stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos – anything! As part of Google Apps for Education, Drive has unlimited storage, so you and your students don’t have to worry about full disks, deleting old files, or losing anything when a computer crashes. You can access your files from any device, and, best of all, you never have to save:Drive automatically saves every time you make an edit!

Google Apps for Education also includes a number of Google products that promote collaboration among students and with their teachers. Students can work together, in class or at home, to complete assignments and group projects. All of their work is auto-saved, and they can even edit without WiFi.

• Google Docs: documents come to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Choose from thousands of fonts, plus add links, images, drawings, and tables
• Google Sheets: spreadsheets for analyzing, visualizing, and charting data
• Google Forms: quick & easy surveys to gather information
• Google Slides: a presentation tool that makes it easy to tell stories
• Google Drawings: Graphics and flowchart creation with shapes, text, and images

Additionally Google Apps for Education includes tools that can be used to save you time and increase student engagement. These include:

• Gmail: Email, contacts, tasks, and communications
• Google Calendar: Scheduling, calendars, and appointments
• Google Hangouts: Live video conferencing and messaging
• Google Sites: Webpage creation and publishing

Editor	Where	Description	Example uses
Docs	docs.google.com	Text documents	Proposals, reports, shared meeting notes
Sheets	sheets.google.com	Spreadsheets	Project plans, budget sheets
Slides	slides.google.com	Presentations	Pitch decks, training modules, team presentations
Forms	forms.google.com	Surveys	Customer satisfaction surveys, group polls
Drawings	drawings.google.com	Shapes, charts, and diagrams	Flowcharts, organizational charts, website wireframes, mind maps