10 years of Classroom in Australia: New AI tools and resources to deliver engaging and safe learning

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In 2014, a team of Googlers (many of whom were former educators) launched Google Classroom as a "mission control" for teachers. With a central place to bring Google’s collaboration tools together, and a constant feedback loop with schools through the Google for Education Pilot Program, Classroom has evolved from a simple assignment distribution tool to a destination for everything a school needs to deliver real learning impact.

For over a decade, we’ve been partnering with Australian schools, academic and government institutions across the country to empower educators and prepare students for the future.

Today, we’re announcing new initiatives to support a bright future for students and educators in Australia. We're evolving to help educators not only save time, but also create time – especially with the help of AI – so they can support meaningful student progress.

Looking ahead, here’s some of the ways we’re innovating with Google AI in Classroom:

• Soon, Gemini in Classroom will be available in Australia as part of the Gemini Education add-ons, with a dedicated tab for educators to kickstart lesson ideas, brainstorm engaging activities, differentiate content for students and more. We’re also expanding the AI track of the Google for Education Pilot Program, unlocking more capabilities this year that lean into LearnLM, Google’s new family of models fine-tuned for learning, based on Gemini and grounded in educational research. Express interest in the AI track
• Today, we’re announcing the launch of Gemini Academy in Australia. It’s an AI skilling program designed to educate teachers and students on how they can use generative AI safely and elevate their creativity and productivity with Gemini. This builds on our partnerships with government and academic institutions to support AI literacy for educators, and with the Adelaide University CSER group to offer free, online courses to help educators effectively integrate AI into their classrooms.
• AI is something that we’ve integrated into our tools for a while, like recommending resources to support students in practice sets, to giving real-time feedback as students engage with interactive video activities. We’ve recently rolled out top-requested features, like AI-suggested questions to more quickly add questions to YouTube videos and new language availability for practice sets.

Enabling data-driven instruction and assessment:

• Over the coming months, Australian educators and instructional leaders will be able to pilot the ability to tag learning skills and standards to assignments and view insights in Classroom analytics to track student progress.
• To differentiate instruction, educators can now define groups of students in Classroom to assign different content based on each group’s needs.
• Marking improvements are now globally rolling out, including the ability for admins to set default grading settings (periods, categories, scales) for their institutions from the Admin console, plus bulk marking and more flexibility for missing and excused assignments.

Developing reading skills:

• Read Along in Classroom, now a Google Workspace for Education service, makes it easier for educators to support each child’s individual reading journey with AI-enabled, real-time feedback for students as they read out loud, plus automated insights and a ready-to-go content library with over 800 books from Heggerty, ReadWorks, and more. In the coming weeks, educators can see insights on students’ phonics skills, to align with books from Heggerty.

Distributing curricula to an entire school, other educators, or parents and guardians:

• Education leaders and educators can create shareable links to their class templates and Classwork pages and share them via email. Educators can then copy the information they want to their own classes.
• Admins can now pilot the ability to distribute content with the Classroom API to distribute approved curricula to Google Classroom for educators to use.
• Educators can also share a link to the Classwork page so parents and guardians can view assigned work, or they can access it via their weekly guardian summary emails.

You can reference this guide to see each feature’s availability, including the Google Workspace for Education edition or add-on required to access them. Note: English availability refers to US English, British English and other languages to follow.

Learn more about Classroom and discover new resources on our Classroom webpage.