Posted by Andrew Cunningham, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

It’s teacher appreciation week here in the U.S., and for me, that means celebrating the teacher who has had absolutely the most impact on my life: Mike Zamansky. Mr Z, as he is affectionately known, has been making Computer Science cool at Stuyvesant High School for more than 20 years, and what I learned in his classes has put me on the path I’m still on today. So from me and everyone at Classroom to Mr. Z and every other teacher who inspires their students: Thank you for doing just that.

A year ago, we marked Teacher Appreciation Week in the U.S. by telling you that Google Classroom was on its way. This year, we’re excited to celebrate this milestone by adding some new Classroom treats in our mobile app that will make it even easier for you to keep track of your classes, no matter where you are or what device you’re on:

• Grade assignments from your phone or tablet, and add private feedback to give students guidance, encouragement, constructive criticism or personalized feedback. 

• You can create and edit assignments on the go, including the ability to make a copy for every student. 
• Just take a photo to create a post or assignment, so you can easily share those whiteboard notes with the class or assign the math problem that you jotted down on that napkin. 

You’ll see these new features rolling out this week, and you can find more about how they work here.

We also wanted to take a moment to look back: since Classroom became available, students have turned in more than 70 million assignments and we’ve added more than 20 new features that you told us were important: 

• The ability to have multiple teachers in a class, so that teaching teams can work together. 
• Prep for classes ahead of time with draft assignments and posts. 
• Autosaved grades allow you to grade in batches. 
• A mobile app for Android and iOS lets you access your classes anywhere, even without cellular data or a WiFi connection. 
• With the teacher assignments page, you can view all of your assignments and track student progress in one place. 
• Stream settings give you control over class discussions; plus you can mute individual students and view deleted items. 
• Archive your finished classes and save everything for next semester. 
• Download grades as a batch, easily exporting them to any gradebook.
• 48 new visual themes and the ability to upload your own so you can customize your class. 
• +mentions let you instantly add students or other teachers into a conversation, making it easier to follow a comment thread. 
• Students can mark assignments as “done” when they don’t need to submit anything online. 
• And many more... 

 Look for more updates from us soon. Now we’re off to (virtually) hug a favorite teacher. Join us!

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

When I was in 5th grade, I complained to my teacher, Mr. Tomazewski, that there must be more to mathematics than simple arithmetic. He concurred and gave me a 7th grade algebra book because he believed in me. I spent the summer working through every problem! With that simple act, Mr. Tomazewski had set me off on a career path that eventually led to the invention of the Internet.

Me at age 11 in 1954

As students, we have the potential to be or do anything—whether and how we fulfill that potential is largely determined by the guidance and encouragement of our teachers.

That’s one reason why Google is so committed to improving teaching and learning through the use of technology. One year ago this week, we announced Classroom, a tool that helps teachers manage assignments, communicate with students and parents, and stay organized. Since then, we’ve continued to add features that teachers and students tell us they need, and if you stay tuned to the Google for Education Blog this week, you’ll hear about a few of our newest additions.

In the spirit of listening to our teachers, we’re also continuing to improve our CS First materials—free online computer science content developed by educators and computer scientists—to help introduce the art of programming to students in grades 4-8 through after-school, in-school and summer programs.

We also realize the importance of what teachers can learn from one another. So with that in mind, this week we’re hosting Education on Air—a free online event with 100+ sessions led by educators from 12 countries and 29 U.S. states. We’ll cover themes that include empowering students, practical innovation, CS and STEM, and building community. Speakers include LeVar Burton and Google Science Fair 2012 winner Brittany Wenger. We hope you can virtually join us May 8-9 for this online education conference, and make sure to register so you can catch recorded videos of all the sessions.

Our lives would be profoundly different without the Mr. Tomazeskis of the world. Please join us in saying thank you to our teachers this week—in person, online, in a handwritten note, or even a meme—for all that they help us to achieve.

Posted by LeVar Burton

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

Editor's note: Through his work with Reading Rainbow, LeVar Burton continues to inspire generations of students to love reading. Getting an early start on celebrating Teacher Appreciation Week, we asked LeVar about educators that inspired him. He shares some stories from his childhood in today’s guest post, and he’ll share more during his keynote, “The power of storytelling to inspire students,” during our Education on Air conference. Register today and tune in for LeVar’s talk on May 8th at 11:15am ET.

Teachers seem to run in my family. My elder sister, my son and two nieces are all educators, and my mother, Erma Gene Christian, was a high school English teacher before becoming my first teacher. I know firsthand how hard these unsung heroes work, and especially how important a teacher can be in a child’s life.

One of the most indelible memories from my childhood happened one day when I was learning to read. My favorite aunt Hope, my mother’s youngest sister, was visiting from Kansas City. We were sitting together in a chair in the living room and I was reading aloud while my mother listened from the kitchen where she was preparing a family meal. Things were going fine until I got stuck on a word. I stopped cold in the middle of a sentence. The word was one I thought I knew, but I didn’t yet have the inner confidence to know that I could read it. I will never forget the infinite patience that Aunt Hope displayed and the gentle nudges of support she gave me. “Go on,” she’d whisper, “You know this word. I know you can sound it out.”

I still remember the word —it was “pretty” — and when my aunt finally said the word to me it was a revelation. She gave me the confidence I needed to trust myself; to trust that I did know these words. I was a reader. This is what teachers do for their students every day.

It’s from my mother, Erma Gene, that I learned the allure of storytelling. Throughout my childhood, mom always had several books going simultaneously, switching from one to the other seamlessly, deriving pleasure from each turn of the page, no matter what the genre. I learned from my mom—and eventually from my own experiences reading, and from exposing children to the joy of books through Reading Rainbow—that storytelling is an elemental part of the human experience, regardless of whether the medium is a print book or a digital book. We know that kids are reading more than 200,000 books a week on the Reading Rainbow App. They are using their devices not just for games or movies, but to read.

Here's me with the first educator who inspired me, my mother.

Children are drawn to stories, and with good storytelling we can teach kids anything. I have seen the light go on in a child’s eyes when he or she falls in love with a story. I’ve seen that light get brighter when they realize that they can read the stories for themselves. This light is the beginning of a lifelong love of reading, and from there a lifelong love of learning. For me, literacy means freedom, and literacy begins with storytelling. You get a child’s attention when you give them a good story. If we fail to take advantage of this, we are letting the opportunity of a lifetime—of our lifetime and theirs—pass us by.

Hear more about the power of storytelling from LeVar Burton during his Education on Air keynote on May 8 at 11:15am ET or check out his Reading Rainbow website.

Posted by Dianne Darlington, Director of Technology, Tullahoma City Schools

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Dianne Darlington, a Google Apps Certified Administrator and director of technology at Tullahoma City Schools, a school district in Tennessee that includes four elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school.

Our teachers at Tullahoma City Schools have discovered (and fully embraced) the benefits of incorporating timely, interactive material into the classroom—whether it’s a recent YouTube video or a breaking news article. Recognizing that technology plays a key role in learning, we recently expanded our use of Google Apps and Google Classroom throughout our schools. Now, teachers across the district use Apps and Classroom to assign projects and provide feedback to students, and students in grades three through nine bring home Chromebooks to continue learning outside the classroom walls.

After passing Google’s IT Admin Certification program, I worked with our technology team to think about how we could further use Google Apps in our schools. Our superintendent, Dan Lawson, presented us with the perfect opportunity. The Tennessee Department of Education rolled out new standards for social studies at the beginning of last school year, and we needed to revamp our educational content for each grade level. His vision was to create digital textbooks that were highly shareable, modifiable and cost-effective. We decided the best way to accomplish this was by using Google Docs. Since teachers were already familiar with Google Apps through our 1:1 Chromebook program, the digital textbooks were a huge success.

A digital textbook is a textbook that lives on a desktop, laptop or mobile devices and is easily editable to provide educational content that is as timely and relevant as possible. Creating the textbooks is as simple as editing in Docs. Teachers often tell me they love creating interactive and engaging content by embedding YouTube videos, games, music and links to websites. For example, when the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, we upgraded our social studies textbooks to include a video of the rover landing from NASA and written content from media sources. Students are more engaged when they’re reading content in their textbooks about an event that happened within the past few days.

Digital textbooks are as fun and engaging for the students as they are for the teachers. The easy ability to edit encourages teachers to update the textbooks with pertinent information based on current events and new material. Whether a teacher wants to insert a recent video or make grammatical changes, she can update the digital textbook instantly. The new version is readily available to students via the textbook library on the class website. With Google Docs’ offline mode, teachers can even edit information when they don’t have access to WiFi.

Once other schools in Tennessee heard about our digital textbooks, they wanted to create them for their students, too. Six school districts asked to use our material, mainly to print physical textbooks at a price of $8 instead of paying a publisher $80, but some are also downloading them digitally and using a 1:1 model as well. Open-source digital textbooks reinforce our mission of relating content to the student, rather than teaching for a standardized test. With Docs, we’ve provided students more timely and engaging information, and we’re excited to roll out digital textbooks across all core subjects in the next three years.

Posted by Jaime Casap, Google for Education

Editor's note: During Education on Air, Google’s free online conference May 8-9, we'll be discussing how we can help prepare students for their future. One member of our opening panel is Jaime Casap, Google’s Global Education Evangelist. In advance of the conference, we asked Jaime to share some of his personal views about the power of high expectations to inspire students. For related resources, check out Reach Higher, the First Lady's effort to inspire all students to take charge of their future by completing their education beyond high school. Resources include a toolkit to host a College Signing Day, which many schools are doing May 1st.

I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, in the 1970s and ‘80s; it was a tough neighborhood that visitors avoided. I wanted out, and while I was the captain of my high school basketball team, I was way too short and slow to make it in the NBA. Despite the challenges of being a first-generation American raised by a single mother on welfare, I had help and support from amazing teachers like Ms. Riddick who encouraged me to work hard to develop the skills I needed to finish high school, attend college and graduate.

Research indicates that low-income minorities are less likely to finish high school, attend college and get a degree. Only 15 to 19 percent of minorities attend college and fewer than nine percent graduate with a Bachelor's degree. There’s a direct correlation between the level of education attained and income level. In other words, education disrupts poverty. While many issues are embedded into the conversation about poverty and education, I can personally relate to something called “Low Expectation Syndrome.” Low Expectation Syndrome is fed by the conditions surrounding low-income minority students. They see failure all around them. They see their childhood friends drop out of high school, and they see more of their friends go to jail than college.

What’s my response to Low Expectation Syndrome? As part of my role I talk to as many students and educators as possible. I don’t ask students what they want to be when they grow up. Instead I ask students to think about what problem they want to solve. I then challenge them to think about the knowledge, skills and abilities they’ll need to solve that problem. What classes can they take? What blogs and journals should they read? Who should they meet and collaborate with? What educational path will prepare them to solve that problem?

I tell students they have amazing capacity and potential. I tell them to ignore the negative and disregard the impossible. I tell them to use stereotypes and statistics as motivation. I tell them not to be ashamed of who they are and where they come from. I tell them they’ll one day be the person in a meeting who has a different and valuable perspective. To put themselves in that position, they need to work hard and get the education to solve the problem that motivates them.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if not for my experience with higher education, which is why I support the First Lady’s Reach Higher effort & hope many schools will consider hosting College Signing Days to celebrate students. As First Lady Michelle Obama says: “Education is the key to success for so many kids. And my goal specifically is to reach out directly to young people and encourage them to take charge of their futures and complete an education beyond high school.” As I tell students every day, the antidote for Low Expectation Syndrome is to have impossibly high expectations for themselves and each other — and then reach even higher.

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, on the anniversary of Isaac Newton’s knighthood, we imagine his research in a Google Apps universe.

In April 1705, Isaac Newton was knighted for his many accomplishments. Since we’re self-admitted history nerds (how better to appreciate the advancements we enjoy now?) we asked ourselves: what if the Isaac Newton of 1705 used today’s Google Apps?

Newton was one of history’s foremost masters of mathematical formulation. What if he had been able to archive and automate his complex formulas in Sheets? We imagine he might have used the product function, =PRODUCT(factor1, factor2), to test different values for his second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration (f = ma) — showing how apples of different sizes fall with different rates of acceleration from a tree.

While writing his famous Principia, Newton might have solicited feedback from his colleagues, like mathematicians Isaac Barrow and John Collins, by creating a Google Group and inviting them to edit in Docs. Working in Docs would have been helpful for keeping track of his notes while developing calculus — it might even have helped to avoid a heated debate with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who claimed he discovered it first. There’s no dispute over who first documents an idea when there’s access to revision history.

Newton famously feared criticism and was no stranger to controversy, so we imagine he would have been a strong advocate of using technology to keep his research secure. Should he have any concerns about a collaborator secretly passing sensitive information to his rival, Robert Hooke, he could adjust the sharing settings. He could even restrict the ability to view, share, download or print his treatise on optics after he’d already shared it.

Newton communicated through writing by hand — it’s estimated that he left behind about 10 million words of notes, letters and manuscripts — but we think he might have used Hangouts for urgent conversations. If Newton needed to speak with his colleagues at the Royal Society about whether Leibniz was guilty of plagiarism, he’d meet with them face-to-face on a Hangout. Or, if his wig wasn’t looking particularly great that day, he could’ve started a group chat and shared pictures of his calculus notation as evidence (maybe even including a few emoji to lighten things up).

As a professor at the University of Cambridge, Newton lectured about optics and presented his research about the properties of light. He might have shared illustrations of prisms to explain rainbows and the color spectrum, uploading the images to a shared Drive folder rather than passing around delicate hand-drawn sketches. Using Drive’s Optical Character Recognition, he could turn his handwritten notes into searchable text. Old notes he wrote on refraction and diffraction would be easy to find and reference as he developed new theories on the nature of light. As one of the most important thinkers and scientists of all time, how valuable would it have been for him to so easily archive and pull up his every great thought and idea?

Sir Isaac Newton’s findings changed our understanding of the world around us and are still relevant to our lives 300 years later. But even more inspiring is the way his curiosity and intellectual daring influenced generations of thinkers to be relentless in pursuing new ideas — a principle (pun intended) that drives us here at Google.

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work Blog.)

Editor's note: Chromeboxes help businesses and schools update employees and students with timely information and create a sense of community. To learn more about using Chromebox for digital signage and how it can help your business or school work smarter, join Chrome Live today.

Schools and universities across the country use digital signage to share announcements, news and schedules. Chromeboxes give students waiting in dorm lobbies for friends or standing in the cafeteria line for lunch the opportunity to learn about campus events on the go. And digital signage apps for Chrome built by Rise Vision, one of our content partners, power many of these digital experiences that go beyond traditional campus fliers.

Here are three ways academic institutions are using Chromeboxes for digital signage to better engage and inform students:

Personalizing content at Siena College

Siena College, a private liberal arts college in Loudonville, New York, prizes its close-knit community of 3,000 students. In this intimate class setting, individual departments manage their own content featured on Chromeboxes for display. IT and display managers don’t have to be involved in day-to-day content updates, and each department is nimble and flexible with their content. For example, the Student Senate features content from the athletics and academic departments on several of its screens and those departments directly update their content to ensure it’s relevant and timely.

Cutting IT costs and time at University of Toronto Mississauga

The University of Toronto Mississauga uses its 25 digital signage displays to profile professors, highlight research projects and market events to their more than 12,600 undergraduate students. Their previous display technology required extensive IT time to configure and update. Since Chromeboxes automatically update with new features and security fixes, IT can spend time on other tasks. Chromeboxes have also freed up the University’s budget, since they’re much more affordable than their previous display equipment, which cost $1,300.

Reducing power use at Manor Independent School District

The 20 digital signage displays in the Manor Independent School District notify the 8,000 K-12 students about announcements, lunchroom menus, upcoming events and recent posts from a live Twitter feed. Previously, the schools relied on netbooks to power their screens, which consumed a lot of power, were noisy and crashed often. Chromeboxes, which don’t have fans or spinning hard drives, were a natural fit as the district sought more eco-friendly display solutions. As universities and school districts continue improving their digital display technology, they’re finding better ways to deliver informative and entertaining content to teachers and current and prospective students. Join Chrome Live to learn how to use Chromebox for digital signage at your school.