ANKARA

As educators worldwide have reinvented their practice online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google will adopt new tools to help make virtual education easier. 

“At Google, we’re honored to work on tools that lighten the load for teachers, school leaders, families, and especially the students who have navigated learning from home with grace and resilience,” Google has recently said in a blog post.

“This year, we’re taking a virtual approach to “back to school” with The Anywhere School, bringing Google for Education announcements to hundreds of thousands of viewers in more than 250 countries around the world,” it added.

Google shared over 50 new features across Meet, Classroom, G Suite, and other products, to support the teaching and learning process inspired by the feedback given by users.

For Meet, a larger tiled view that can show up to 49 meeting participants and an integrated Jamboard whiteboard for collaboration will be available in September.

Also, Google will give moderators of meetings more controls for managing such as choosing to always join first, ending meetings for all participants and disabling in-meeting chat.

In October, Google will launch custom and blurred backgrounds to provide some extra privacy.

As more teachers around the world using Classroom more than ever before, Classroom will soon be available in 10 additional languages, for 54 languages total.

Google will also enable educators in Classroom to share a link to invite students to their class, which makes joining a class much easier.

G Suite Enterprise for Education, which provides advanced analytics and security controls, will help educators detect matches for potential plagiarism not only against webpages, but between student submissions at their school.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents, according to the UN.

The pandemic has claimed nearly 760,000 lives in 188 countries and regions since it originated in China last December. The US, Brazil, India and Russia are currently the worst-hit countries in the world.

More than 20.93 million COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide, with recoveries exceeding 13 million, according to figures compiled by the US' Johns Hopkins University.