Google announces new features for education-focused services

Google, a multinational technology company, has recently announced new features for its education-focused products. For example, G Suite for Education, its best-in-class productivity tool for learning and teaching, has been rebranded as Google Workspace for Education.

In October 2020, the technology company revealed the first branding of Workspace for its office apps suite. Despite this branding, its education-focused suite has been retaining the G Suite branding to date. Apart from these changes, the free version of G Suite for Education has been rebranded as Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, whereas G Suite Enterprise for Education has been renamed as Google Workspace for Education Plus. It will automatically roll over its existing customers for G Suite Enterprise for Education to Google Workspace for Education Plus.

In addition, Google is planning to make data storage policy changes for the education customers. The company has previously offered unlimited storage to the qualifying institutions. However, it will shift schools to a pooled storage model from 2022, offering a 100TB baseline of pooled storage, shared in an institution. This new policy will become effective for all the existing customers in July 2022.

Furthermore, Google is expected to unveil new features of Google Meet, its video communication service, to enhance virtual learning, as well as other features for the non-education customers. Several other new features to be launched include:

  • Meeting transcripts for education & enterprise Meet customers in 2021
  • Emoji reactions for all Meet users by August 2021
  • Ability to mute or end a call for everyone attending

According to new feature updates, students would not be able to join calls on Meet before the teacher does, and the app will be able to restrict meetings to only teachers and students based on a Classroom roster. Google Classroom will also support add-ons from 3rd-party services as well as provide offline support for the Classroom app.

Source credit:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/17/22284012/google-g-suite-education-workspace-meet-classroom-data-storage