There’s a new innovation hitting classes this year.  It is bigger than the Promethean board and the best thing since sliced bread… It is Google Classrooms.

Students can now ask questions, turn in work and download assignments with the Google Classrooms app via smartphone or online on the website. This also means teachers can grade assignments quickly and give feedback to students even when they are hundreds of miles away.

Lately it has been making big waves for the history department since they received Chromebooks last year and have been slowly working their way into student lives ever since. “It is a useful tool for learning,” social studies teacher Michael Celenza said.

One of its bigger features is its seamless integration with Google Docs and other Google apps such as Gmail. This means your teachers can make an assignment on Classroom and you can complete it anywhere with the Google Docs app on your smartphone. “You can post [any] assignment on there,” social studies teacher Matthew Quinn said.

Social studies teacher Lauren Squier added, “I love Google Classrooms… It is very easy for kids to access it.”

But the social studies department is not the only department utilizing this new tool. Technology education teacher Edward Graf also uses Google Classrooms with his students on an almost daily basis thanks to his class being situated in a room that has desktop computers available.

While teachers are loving the accessibility, freshman Camille Nazzal said, “It would be easier to just use paper,” because “internet problems happen to everyone.”

When the technology does work, however, students are finding that using Google Docs is extremely helpful for group work.  “I like how you can work as a group on one document,” junior Lenox Kamara said.  Multiple users can access the same document at the same time, and work can continue at home, so there’s no more forgetting to email something or bring it home on a flash drive.