Initially when Google launched Google Classrooms, at that time it wasn’t introduced to create a Learning Management System – LMS. But, during this world Pandemic COVID-19, the educational system changed completely. Google found out that a lot of educators have adopted to use Google Classrooms as the main medium to conduct their daily classroom lectures. 

As compared to last year when only 40 million people were using Google Classrooms, now as for today, almost 150 million people are using this tool, including teachers, students and school admins. 

Today, Google introduced several updates for its online education tools, these updates and development have been accelerated during the world pandemic. As Google Classrooms have been widely used by educators now, so Google has promised to come up with 50 new updates, keeping in mind the needs of students, educators and school admins. 

Focusing on the needs of educators, Google is developing updates to cater all those who are using Classroom as the main hub for learning and management. During this year, “add-ons” of Classroom will allow teachers to select edtech tools and content. 

With this feature teachers can assign contents directly to students, without requiring extra log-ins. Further, School admins can also install these add-ons for other teachers in their domains. 

Moreover, later this year, admins will be able to populate classes in advance with Student Information System (SIS) roster by syncing. Further, for select SIS customers, students’ grades from Classroom can be exported directly to the SIS. 

Additional feature of logging will be more developed, including Classroom audit logs to see all the details of the students like student removals or who archived a class. Classroom activity logs can also be monitored more accurately and easily in order to check adoption and engagement.  

Other tools that are rolling out now and will be further introduced during the year will tackle the realities of working from home especially in this pandemic. We all know we face internet connection issues as they are not reliable, for students with low-income or those areas which do not offer best services. 

Hence, Google is rolling out an updated Classroom Android app, with which students will be able to start their work offline. They will be able to review assignments, open Drive attachments and write in Google Docs without an internet connection.  Isn’t it great? 

The daily work will be synced with only one click of a button and when a connection is again available your documents will be there already. 

New tools will allow students to upload file along with pictures in one folder and will also allow them to crop and rotate images and adjust lighting according to their pictures. 

Google Classroom will also have rich text formatting — like bold, italics, underline and adding bullets across web, iOS and Android. 

In order to maintain originality of reports a tool is being introduced named “Originality Reports”, this will detect the plagiarism of documents and soon these will be available in 15 different languages. 

And Google’s own free, introductory computer science curriculum, CS First, is immediately available in Classroom. 

Beyond Classroom itself, Google Meet is also being updated with the needs of educators in mind. 

Pandemic has taught us many ways to use internet and technology in useful ways, even students tend to waste less time on computers, while playing games or watching videos – can we say the credit goes to online classes? 

Great news to those who were finding ways to keep up with the family group chat while playing Beat Saber. Well, Guess what? This day has finally come. 

According to Oculus Quest developer’s latest update, VR company that is owned by Facebook announced that Facebook in this week Messenger will start rolling out to Quest headsets. Now you’ll be able to chat by simply typing in VR, using voice-to-text, or by inserting generic auto-filled statements into the conversation. 

A plus point of this update is that Messenger on Quest doesn’t segregate users based on device.  Multiple VR Users that want to communicate with each other can create an Oculus party from within Messenger to group up in any multiplayer game they feel like playing together. 

The whole chatting mechanism can is now much easier. Users can type their message in virtual reality and can also send pre-written messages. Company’s developers also have a new way to distribute VR apps and games. 

According to the Oculus sources, chatting with Messenger friends through your headset won’t affect your Oculus privacy settings. You’ll still be able to use Oculus Chats to message friends with your own Oculus username.  

Software update v25, which is starting to roll out also introduces a feature called App Lab. It is going to enable developers to distribute their apps and games outside of the Oculus Store. Facebook also suggests that his feature will allow users to have high quality within the store and will also provide secure environment to the developers. 

Even though these apps may not be in the Oculus Store, you will still be able to search them if you know the exact name and it will pop up in the App Lab section of the results.  

However, integrating Messenger with Oculus Quest headsets is yet another excuse to spend as much time in VR as possible. But it is something that we certainly understand especially during these trying times.  

Don’t forget to take breaks every now and then. That Messenger chat with your friend can wait.