Google launched Classroom, a free app for educators

Google announced preview of its new app - Classroom, a free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. It helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease.

The news Classroom app is an add-on to existing Google Apps for Education suite.

Teachers, professors and educators can apply for a preview of Classroom, Google will then be inviting a limited number of educators to try Classroom in about a month, based on the requests it will receive. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education.

Google envisaged this new app by working closely with many educators to understand the systems they use to simplify their workloads and currently with more than a dozen pilot schools and universities to try this news app and provide feedback to Google.

With Classroom, educators will be able to:

• Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.


• Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time-improving communication inside and outside of class.


• Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page.

In short, Classroom app will be useful tools for such educators who used to spend a lot of time doing things other than teaching such as grade quizzes, collecting and returning of paper assignments. The app is based on the principle that educational tools should be simple and easy to use, and is designed to give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn.

Google also confirms that Classroom app, like rest of other Google Apps for education services will be completely Ads-free and it will never uses users' content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.

Via - Google Official Blog

Google Launches Person Finder for Missing Ones in Flood of Uttarakhand, India

Lately, Google India has launched Person Finder to give information on missing people and trace them in severe flood affected areas of Uttarakhand state of India, the web app is available for public in both Hindi and English versions.

Google Person Finder is a web application that allows individuals to post and search for the status of missing relatives or friends affected by a disaster as affected areas are so badly hit by flood that it became inaccessible and communication become very scarcely possible. All data entered into Google Person Finder is available to the public and searchable and accessible by anyone.

The program also lets press agencies, non-governmental agencies and others contribute to the database and receive updates by using the Person Finder API based on the PFIF open standard.

The National Disaster Management Authority has listed the following helpline numbers for control rooms across rain affected areas in the state of Uttarakhand (please use India country code +91 as appropriate):

Uttarkashi:	(+91) 1374-226461,
Chamoli:	(+91) 1372-251437, 9411352136,
Rudraprayag:	(+91) 1364-233727,9412914875,
Tehri:	(+91) 1376-233433, 9411548090
Kedarnath:	(+91) 1364-233727
Control Room (Uttarakhand):	(+91) 135-2710334, 9557444486

Jayanth Mysore, Senior Product Manager on behalf of Google APAC and the Google Crisis Response team said - "We hope Person Finder helps people get the latest information about their near and dear ones in these flood affected areas."

Via - Google India Blog

Google Apps crossed 25 million Users, Giving Free Laptop Stickers

Google Apps since its launch in 2006 has managed to acquire 25 million users including companies, organizations, government organizations and big brands across the globe. The customers of Google apps includes Jaguar Land Rover, National Geographic, Motorola Mobile Devices, Huffington Post to government bodies such as District of Columbia Government, Los Angeles etc.

Google is also giving personalized Laptop Stickers free for a limited time if you are already using Google Apps or even if you are planning to join.

If you are already a Google App user you may put yourself or your organization over the Google map here

Also, more interesting part is that Google has also announced Google Apps migration tool that helps people or organization who are using Microsoft Exchange to migrate to Google Apps in easy steps. Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange is a new server-side tool that migrates your company's email, calendar and contact data from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The similar migration is also available for Lotus notes users.

One can see use this small Google Apps calculator utility tool so as to see how much you can save for a given number of employees while using Google Apps premier edition in place of Microsoft Exchange 2007, you might see a huge difference.