Each new generation of students is increasingly well-versed in technology. Before they begin walking, toddlers drag their snack-stained fingers across tablet screens with amazing dexterity. How children learn is rapidly evolving based on the environment around them, so educators are looking to enhance their students’ learning experience by integrating new technologies that connect with them on a platform they’re already engaged with. Google recently opened access to its Classroom education platform, which allows teachers to track assignments and students to manage their course loads. With new advancements in cohesive technologies to connect schools, teachers and students alike are empowered to collaborate and learn on their own terms.

Google Apps For Education, abbreviated GAFE, is a modified version the suite of free web tools that Google offers to businesses—including staples like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. Apps for Education allows teachers to create accounts for their students and join forces in making educational communication easier. But in previous versions of GAFE, teachers were often overwhelmed by complex processes involved with sharing documents with students, receiving individual responses, and providing feedback on assignments. Now, Google is expanding its vision for schools with Google Classroom.

Libbi Mason, educator and Technology Integration Coach at St. Raphael School in Bay Village, Ohio, participated in the company’s beta program before the Google Classroom launch. She, and teachers like her, are excited for the new tools for increased interactivity and process efficiency.

“Before the addition of Google Classroom [to GAFE], there were so many steps involved in just sharing a document and getting response from individual students. With Google Classroom, there’s a formal process for a common classroom workflow—when teachers share the document, they can select a ‘make a copy for each student’ command. It seems minor, but it’s incredible—our teachers have been overjoyed.”

Google Classroom allows for the creation of individual classes and adding new students with only a few clicks, as opposed to the tedious process involved with adding new employees to a traditional Google Apps account. Teachers can generate assignments and release classroom announcements, and calendar integrations make due dates hard for students to miss. As students submit assignments through their Google Classroom portal, each document arrives time-stamped and organized in the teacher’s Google Drive “incoming” folder. This automatic sorting and filing helps alleviate problems with managing and grading massive stacks of paper. With Classroom, educators can even monitor assignments as students complete them in real time, allowing them to measure student progress and identify when students need help sooner. According to Google, Classroom is designed to give teachers “more time for teaching [and] more time for learning.”

More time for teaching. More time for learning.

By enhancing learning through interactive components across devices that students are naturally drawn to, there is an opportunity for them to flourish in settings that are very similar to future workplaces. Much like Apple’s strategy to introduce the Macintosh schools in the 1980s and 90s, Google’s aggressive inclusion of their web application suite will familiarize students with their features, fostering an affinity for Google products as they grow up and begin purchasing mobile devices and services of their own.

Apple, too, has introduced a program for bulk licensing of iOS App Store content called the Volume App Purchase Program for Education. Like GAFE, Apple’s offering is an education-flavored version of a similar program available to enterprise businesses—users can purchase apps in bulk at a discount and load them onto provisioned iPods and iPads for use in the classroom. Google offers similar programs for its Google Play Store and Chrome Web Store, and targets educational institutions with its affordable Chromebook family. But Google Classroom balks at the “education version of a business platform” model, and offers real, school-specific utility to both students and teachers.

Classroom offers students a convenient and safe access point to their work, to ask for help, and participate in discussions. Similar to Facebook’s News Feed, Classroom offers a “student view” dashboard where to view upcoming assignments, ask teachers questions, and have automatic, up-to-the-minute access to their grades. Educators have the ability to leave notes on assignments, giving students the chance to receive more timely teacher attention than by traditional tactics. Amy Allen, a technology specialist at St. Raphael School, sees Google Classroom as a means for students to become even more invested in their assignments.

“With Classroom, students become the creators of their own content. Whereas traditional assignments are created and handed out by the teachers, students in Google Classroom can generate their own documents from scratch.”

Both Mason and Allen have seen Google Classroom effectively “flip” the traditional classroom. The educational system has long tried to balance the most effective methods to help children retain information, since everyone learns and communicates differently. With Google Classroom, teachers can provide new avenues for engagement—uploading audio recordings, screencasts, and video content that can be accessed virtually anywhere. This customizability and universal accessibility will allow students to learn on their own terms, review content independently at home, and better use class time to get hands-on help from their teachers.

“Classroom allows teachers to attach so many different components right into the assignment,” said Mason. “They offer buttons to insert virtually anything—files from Google Drive, links to YouTube videos, and so on. There’s no strict definition of what an assignment should look like anymore. The possibilities are endless.”

When we asked where this type of innovation within the class and education system could lead, Allen and Mason both discussed the ability to offer students even more through platforms like Classroom. Not only will the platform allow students to learn how they want, it could even expand their selection to learn what they want. The system has the potential to solve limitations on enrollment in an elective or inadequate funding for a full course, allowing schools to offer a much more diverse and custom-tailored curriculum that suits each individual students.

As these platforms mature, teachers will have an opportunity to integrate technology into every aspect of their courses and engage with tech-savvy generations of students in ways relevant to them. In many ways, the education system defines a child’s development, and technology is no longer an afterthought in that story. “Computers” are no longer an elective focused on words per minute—technology will be interwoven into the fabric of how we educate our children.

“Teachers will not be replaced by technology,” said Allen, “but teachers who don’t embrace technology and the enhancements it brings to learning will be replaced by those who do.”