Education is one of the facets of daily life that most disturbed you’re seeing by the fault of the pandemic of coronavirus that we suffer. Schools closedmillions of students who are homebound from one day to another, and teachers in need of ways to get learning content and manage the duties.
Google Classroom it is an e-learning platform that allows students to communicate directly with each other and with their teachers. At the same time, makes it easier to use Google tools (like Gmail and Drive) to develop and deliver the tasks, and that teachers use the educational edition of Google Apps to organize them and evaluate them.
It is a solution of elearning is very popular in the united States (6 years ago which is present in the country’s schools)but the current crisis has placed this platform in the disparadero: many countries where it had little presence have jumped on the boat of Classroom bulk, and overall, Google has seen it duplicated its users to add more than 100 million.
According to a study released by AppBrain, the mobile app for Google Classroom it has been downloaded 50 million times since the start of the pandemicbecome the app education more popular, when at the beginning of march had no presence, not even in the TOP 100 of that category.
The company has been put in place a web of educational resources in conjunction with UNESCO.
The Italian case
Javier Soltero, vice president of Google responsible for the development of Google Classroom and the rest of the tools of the G-Suite, received an email in march from his team in Europe: we transported a query from the Italian Ministry of Education asking if the Google platform would be able to put online all of its national education system immediately.
After the closure of 28,000 Italian schools in February, the newly arrived minister of Education, Lucia Azzolina, had announced the creation of a working group “to ensure learning at a distance”, that collect the material and prepare a platform from which to offer it.
“Several days and nights without sleep” after receiving the email, such as account Single, the service was in operation and available for millions of children in Italy.
Now, the own website of the Italian Ministry of Education offers instructions to the heads of the schools about how to enroll in Google Classroomand how to speed up the process by getting in touch with the partners Italian program Google For Education.
Google has come to collaborate with companies of the telecom Italian in order to facilitate that students can resorting to the telephone line to, at least, and in the absence of other means, to listen to the video conferencing of their teachers.
Google is spreading, in Italy and many other countries, ways of using its platform to address the ‘educational emergency’. According to the Italian web Spremute Digitali, one of the reasons why it ended not take off at the alpine country were doubts about the privacy, a topic that has been a bit of a side to the emergency of the situation.
But Italy is not an extraordinary case: as the crisis has been expanding, the team Single has received a surge in requests from institutions in many other countries. An expansion which, as she explains, “it reflects, unfortunately, the growth and spread of the disease”.
Image | 9to5 Google & Your Story & Reppublica.it
it was originally published in
Engadget
by
Marcos Merino
.
