What to know
- Google Classroom has introduced a new ‘Student Groups’ feature.
- The feature lets teachers create groups before assigning group work.
- Student Groups is accessible from the ‘People’ tab in Google Classroom.
Google has unveiled a new feature for its popular educational platform, Google Classroom. The aptly titled Student Groups feature aims to streamline the process of organizing students for group activities and assignments.
Teachers can now add students to predefined groups before assigning group work. This new functionality is accessible from the ‘People’ tab within Google Classroom, making it easy for educators to manage their class structure.
The feature is designed to save time and reduce the complexity of managing group assignments. Teachers using Google Classroom can now create, edit, and manage student groups with greater ease. This feature is expected to be particularly useful for projects that require consistent group compositions over time.
The Student Groups feature is now available to Google Classroom users.
Thanks for this update. I posted a similar comment at The Verge. As I explain below, the feature is a step forward, but more functionality needed to facilitate student teamwork and assessment.
I am a professor of Engineering and Sustainability at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. I have been using Google Classroom for several years, and I have been eagerly awaiting such a feature. I was happily surprised when I logged in on August 21 to see the “Groups” button added. On searching for more information, I discovered your article.
My early impression after less than a week of use is that the feature can facilitate differentiated instruction, as advertised by Google, because instructors can use it to monitor and give customized assignments to subgroups.
But there is much functionality lacking. In my case, I use cooperative learning in which students work in teams and have to submit a single, shared document for the team. In the past, if one team member submitted a shared document as an assignment, after I would annotate and return it, only the submitting student would have access. This meant that either the submitting student or I would need to manually share the annotated document with the other members.
I was hoping that the Groups feature would enable team assignments, but it appears that this is not the case. Earlier this week, I formed 12 groups in my class, and then I created an assignment to all of the groups. I noticed that it is not possible to sort the assigned students by team, and it is not possible to email them by team (moreover, for assignments that were created before the groups were established, the group name does not appear at all). Plus, Google’s own documentation states that students will not be able to see their team assignments. I therefore have every reason to believe that there will be no practical improvement on the process to assign and mark common team assignments. I will be able to confirm this in the near future, once I have collected some assignments.
I hope Google will keep iterating this feature to allow “visible groups” and sharing/annotating of group documents and assignments. While I’m at it, the analytics could be improved to show more detail about when students are interacting with the different materials posted on the site.