Introducing G Suite for Education
Google Apps for Education arrived on the scene ten years ago with a vision to help teachers and students share and learn together in innovative ways. Since then, we’ve added products like Google Classroom and Hangouts — tools that transcend the meaning of what an app means today, tools that are powerful alone but even better when they work together. So we’re excited to introduce a new name for Google Apps for Education that better reflects the collaborative power of these tools and reinforces our dedication to teachers and students: G Suite for Education.
G Suite for Education is the same set of apps that you know and love—Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Hangouts, and more— but designed with new intelligent features that make work easier and bring teachers and students together. Because we believe that when students and teachers break down silos and have collaborative tools for their classroom, amazing learning can happen.
Here are some of the new features recently launched in G Suite for Education:
We launched Explore in Google Sheets to help summarize spreadsheet data with automated charts and insights. But many students might not experience the full value of spreadsheets because they can't write formulas. This is a case of the computer requiring you to speak its language. Machine intelligence turns this upside down, so now the computer understands your language. Students can simply enter a question using natural language and Explore in Google Sheets will use Natural Language Processing to translate the question into a formula and offer an instant answer.
We’ve also added Explore in Google Docs with machine intelligence to automatically recommend related topics to learn about, images to insert, and more content to discover. Students can even use Explore in Google Docs to find a related document from Drive, so they spend less time switching between apps and more time polishing their assignments. And educators will be happy to hear that image searches performed using Explore limit results to those that comply with SafeSearch and are approved for use with Creative Commons.
For students, making a presentation inspiring can be a lot of work. Often, students spend more time formatting slides than thinking creatively about the story they want to tell. Now, as students add content to a presentation, Explore in Google Slides dynamically offers layout suggestions that help the content shine. In just a couple of clicks, students can create polished presentations that bring their ideas to life. The best thing about these intelligent features is that they'll continue to learn and improve over time the more they're used, and save students even more time tomorrow than they save them today.
Finding time to meet with other teachers can be hard, especially when the list of people and locations you’re coordinating starts to grow. Google Calendar uses machine intelligence to help you easily find a time when invitees are free, and it also suggests available rooms based on your previous bookings. And, when the list of invitees grows long and no times are available, Calendar will suggest times across the group where the conflicts are easiest to resolve, such as recurring 1:1 meetings.
From the beginning our suite was built on the idea that when people can work together easily from anywhere, they accomplish more. These updates to G Suite for Education help teachers and students take back the time they spend on repetitive tasks. With our focus on machine intelligence and our commitment to transforming schools, there’s much more to come.
We’d love to hear your feedback about G Suite for Education so we can continue to build products that meet the needs of schools — just click the Send Feedback button to send your views straight to Google.