Google Launches 'The Anywhere School' With 50 New Features To Boost Online Learning

To help millions of students tide over the pandemic-induced learning from home tech giant Google has announced a new initiative called 'The Anywhere School.'

With this initiative, Google will also roll out over 50 new features across Meet, Classroom, G Suite and other products to hundreds of thousands of viewers in more than 250 countries around the world.

"At Google, we're honoured to work on tools that lighten the load for teachers, school leaders, families, and especially the students who have navigated learning from home with grace and resilience," the company said in the blog post.

The video-calling app Google Meet will have a larger tiled view of up to 49 people and an integrated Jamboard whiteboard for collaboration in September.

In an effort to ease the digital meetings, it will release new controls which would allow moderators to choose to always join first, end meetings for all participants, disable in-meeting chat, and more such features.

In October, Google will launch custom and blurred backgrounds in Meet to provide some extra privacy.

"Breakout rooms and attendance tracking will also be launching for all Google Enterprise for Education customers, allowing for more engaged classes and insights on participation," said Avni Shah, VP of Education at Google.

The company would roll out hand-raising for all customers and Q&A and polling for G Suite Enterprise for Education customers, later this year.

"Plus, we'll launch a new temporary recordings feature which will be available to all Education customers for free (premium recordings will still be part of G Suite Enterprise for Education)," Shah informed.

Additionally, changes would also allow teachers to share a link to invite students to their class, which would make joining a class much easier. The classroom will soon be available in 10 additional languages, for 54 languages in total.

With "G Suite Enterprise for Education", educators will be able to see matches for potential plagiarism not only against webpages but between student submissions at their school.

Google recently launched "SmartCompose" and "AutoCorrect in Docs" for educators and students to help them compose high-quality content faster by cutting back on repetitive writing while reducing the chance of spelling and grammatical errors.

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