Google Beefs Up Docs, Classroom for Back-to-School Season

Google’s “Classroom” tool, which lets educators manage all the digital materials they submit to their students (and vice versa) got a small update as well.

Google is rolling out a few enhancements to Docs today including search and voice typing. To try it out, just head over to the Tools menu in Docs and activate Voice typing.

Google unveiled a series of new features for Docs, Sheets and Slides Wednesday, including voice typing and new collaboration tools for Docs. Finally, there are new Forms, giving users a way to insert GIFs, videos, images and select one of many question formats for polling others.

And with the company’s new preschool-style logo, it might see its classroom presence grow even more pervasive in coming years. You just tap and start talking, and it works on Docs for Android, iOS, and the web. One is a new research tool for Docs in Android that allows users to use Google’s search engine while composing documents.

In developing Research, Google has pared down the 14 clicks needed to insert an image into a Doc from a mobile phone down to just a handful. These new features make Google for Work just an extra little bit smarter, which may provide an extra edge. Google has made it easier for users to see what was added or deleted, making collaborations with friends, classmates, or colleagues easier as you will be able to pick up where they left off. These changes should already be live in Google Docs so fire it up and take it for a spin if you’re curious. Called “Explore”, any table in Sheets can now be analyzed and turned into graphs and other charts for easy assessment.

Ritcha Ranjan, product manager for Google Docs Editors, said students are increasingly beginning assignments from their smartphones, where switching between apps is often a clunky process. The “explore” sidebar also runs quick analysis on the data it’s displaying, telling you quick facts about the trends it sees.

On the collaboration side, Docs is also getting a new “See New Changes” feature that makes it easier to view changes that have been made to documents with multiple contributors.

That includes the ability for a teacher to push out a website to an entire classoom and have it automatically open in their Chrome browsers – useful, especially considering that Google claims considerable traction with its Chromebook line of lightweight, browser-only computers in the classroom.