Google Class Tools Help Teachers Manage Devices and Distraction

Digital Guardrails for Classroom Devices

To that end, Google offers Class tools, a solution for managed Chromebooks with Google Workspace for Education Plus, that includes both device management capabilities and real-time instructional tools. Class tools enables teachers to apply guardrails to students’ digital learning experience.

Instead of students having unfettered access to the entire internet, “teachers can manage exactly what resources students have access to,” Chapman says. “If teachers want you to be working on National Geographic and writing an article in Google Docs, they can give you access to just those two resources, and the students can’t go anywhere else on the internet.”

Other capabilities include real-time transcription and translation for multilingual learners. “Teachers could be teaching in English, but have a student who speaks Spanish, Portuguese or German at home,” Chapman says. “That student can click a button on their device, and it will surface the teacher’s instruction to them in the language of their choice, in near real time.” Class tools supports over 200 languages for students to learn in.

With Class tools, a teacher can also check in remotely on students’ activities by accessing their screens with the click of a button. “The teacher can follow along and see exactly how you’re progressing through their assignment” and can quickly identify those who aren’t keeping up, Chapman says.

This same feature enables the teacher to broadcast a student’s screen for others to see, opening opportunities for peer review. Likewise, a recent enhancement to Class tools makes it easy for teachers to broadcast their own device to the front of the room, even when they’re not sitting at their desks.

With the Class tools display app, “you don’t need to be hardwired with an HDMI cable,” Chapman says. “You can walk around with your device in convertible mode, using it like a tablet, and when you click a button, suddenly your screen is being presented at the front of the classroom.”

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How Students and Teachers Benefit

With the right classroom management capabilities, teachers can allay parents’ worries about device overuse, while at the same time enhancing the learning experience. 

When students’ internet access is limited, “they’re no longer testing the boundaries of what they can get to and what they can click on,” Chapman says. “Students can’t get distracted and go look at the most recent football scores. It keeps them focused specifically on what teachers want them to be working on.”

The ability to easily monitor student activity makes for a stronger face-to-face learning environment. “It really benefits the relationship between teacher and student,” he says. “You don’t have to walk around and say, ‘Get off of whatever that is that you’re on,’ because you know they’re working on the Google Doc.”

Likewise, the live transcription feature gives both students and teachers a boost, particularly in districts where in-class interpreters aren’t available. With real-time transcriptions and translations of the teacher’s instruction, kids who are still learning English or who have hearing impairments are more likely to keep pace, and the teacher is better equipped to help them learn. 

Google is already receiving positive feedback from customers. One school responded, "We’ve got a real vast number of languages spoken at home. Class tools opens a lot of doors for children that in the past would have been quite isolated in the classroom. The translation is just right there in front of them. When would you have ever been able to do that in the classroom?"

Bringing Classroom Management to Life

For IT teams, Class tools is simple to implement via toggle switches in the Google Admin console. “Once that’s done, teachers can start using it immediately from their Chromebooks,” Chapman says. To help districts use Class tools effectively, Google offers training materials for both administrators and teachers.

As teachers look to bring classroom management to life, they can leverage their existing tools. With Google Classroom integrations, for example, “you don’t need to figure out how you’re going to facilitate a lesson in the moment, as kids are logging in to the devices,” Chapman says.

“Teachers can preplan all of their content within Google Classroom, and then when they’re actually teaching their class, they can deliver those assignments directly to the students,” he says. “You can get all of your resources ready and then get students to the resources that they need very quickly.”

With robust classroom management, teachers are empowered to work more effectively, “and it makes for a much better and more engaging experience for the students,” he says.

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