Google Classroom: New treats for teachers and students

Posted by Vance Vagell, User Experience Prototyper

In every classroom around the world, teachers spend time decorating their rooms by tacking up fun decorations and outstanding student work. Starting today, teachers can bring those same personal touches to Classroom by uploading their own images to use as themes. That’s just one of the little surprises we’ve sprinkled throughout Classroom to brighten your winter (or sweeten your summer, for our Southern Hemisphere friends).

If you have an image you’d like to use as your theme, Classroom will help you crop it to the perfect dimensions, and automatically pick a matching class color. And in case you don’t have a great photo to use, we’re adding 18 new images and 30 pattern themes to our gallery, so teachers have lots of options to make their classes look great. If you don’t have time to browse all the themes, Classroom will even try to automatically match a relevant theme to the class title — it works well for common topics, but it might not find a perfect theme for topics like History of the Peloponnesian War or Quantum Computing 401.

Today we’re also making updates to the mobile app for iOS and Android, which we launched a month ago:

• Students and teachers can now view the About page in the mobile app for quick access to their class materials and resources 
• On iOS, students can now add images, videos, and any other files to assignments from other apps 
• Your favorite emoji are now available on the Android app [insert smiley face here] 
• We’ve made overall changes that will increase the speed of the app’s performance, so you can get your work done even faster

You’ll notice a lot of other small updates that we hope will bring some delight and productivity to your February classes, and as always: please keep the feedback coming.

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