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Use your favorite education tools in Classroom with add-ons

Aug 01, 2022

[[read-time]] min read

Dave Messer
Product Manager, Google for Education
Illustration showing an educator looking at their laptop and seeing various education-related digital interfaces connected.
10:25

We know that educators have go-to digital tools to make their lessons more engaging. But with that comes the challenges of managing multiple accounts and passwords, helping students navigate other websites, and handling grading on different platforms. Now, educators will be able to easily find, add, use and grade content from popular EdTech tools, right within Google Classroom. Add-ons provide a better end-to-end experience to not only save time for educators, but also simplify the digital classroom experience for students, too.

Use popular education tools, right within Classroom

To make EdTech tools work better together, we partnered with 18 partners to offer add-ons for Classroom. You can do things like assign a trivia game from Kahoot!, browse content from IXL’s repository by subject or grade level, and make it easy for students to access interactive Pear Deck presentations, all within Classroom. With the content and activities of these educational partners accessible within Classroom, we hope it’s even easier to diversify your lessons and help students learn in new ways.

  • Animation showing that students can find a Pear Deck presentation from within Classroom, interact with it, then turn it in.

    With just a few clicks, students can access, and turn in, interactive Pear Deck presentations from within Classroom.

  • Animation showing that an educator can use add-ons to create an assignment, browse skills in the IXL add-on by subject or grade level, then add it to an assignment within Classroom.)

    The IXL add-on allows you to browse IXL skills by subject or grade level before adding it to a Classroom Assignment or Stream, and even assign skills to a specific student.

  • Animation showing that teachers can search for kahoots that they have made or save, all within Classroom.

    With the Kahoot! add-on, teachers can access kahoots they made or saved, and make them easy for students to use, all without leaving Classroom.

To start, we’ll have add-ons from Adobe Express for Education, BookWidgets, CK-12, Edpuzzle, Formative, Genially, Google Arts & Culture, Google Play Books, IXL, Kahoot!, Nearpod, Newsela, PBS LearningMedia, Pear Deck, SAFARI Montage, Sora from OverDrive Education, WeVideo and Wordwall. If you don’t see a particular add-on within Classroom, email your admin to ask if your district can set up that add-on, or give feedback within Classroom to request new add-ons partners that aren’t on this list.

A grid of the logos of the new add-ons partners.
Illustration of the “Sign in with Google” functionality showing a student with a user interface.

Save time with a one-click login

While many classes currently use external EdTech tools, one of the biggest challenges of truly integrating them into lessons remains the busy work of remembering passwords, helping students navigate to external websites and trying to manage content and grading outside of Classroom. With add-ons, educators and students can easily access content by simply logging in to their Classroom account.

Simplify your grading workflows

To make grading easier for educators, many of the add-ons have integrated time-saving features like auto-grading, insights and grade syncing. Various add-ons also provide the opportunity to grade right within Classroom and include personalized feedback when sharing a grade back with students. All add-ons sync with the Classroom gradebook, too.

  • Animation showing the CK-12 add-on and how it enables teachers to view insights and actionable recommendations related to students).

    The CK-12 add-on lets you create interactive assignments, track class performance across assignments, see auto-graded results and view insights that show concept-level performance patterns and actionable recommendations for each student.

  • Animation depicting the Nearpod add-on and how educators can see how much students participated in a lesson and how well they scored on assignments.)

    With the Nearpod add-on, teachers can assign lessons to their class or individual students, review reports of student engagement and activity, and record grades directly within Google Classroom.

  • Animation of the Edpuzzle add-on and how a quiz can be auto-graded because it uses multiple choice questions.)

    Edpuzzle makes it easy to find or create video lessons, measure progress with real-time information on student engagement and comprehension and save time with auto-grading for certain question types.

Visual of the Google Classroom assignment creation screen showing the new add-ons module with partner names listed.

Get started with Classroom add-ons

Admins: District admins will need to set up add-ons and can then enable access for educators. As a reminder, admins need to have the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning Upgrade assigned to each educator that they want to have access to add-ons. Once admins set up individual add-ons for their district, a trainer in the school can use this professional development kit (including a presentation and lesson plan) to show educators how to get started using add-ons. We also worked with add-ons partner Genially to create an interactive version of the professional development training.

Educators: Once the district admin has set up the add-ons feature and individual add-ons, educators can find an “add-ons” module within the Assignment and Stream screens. From there, they will see the list of available add-ons for their district. Learn more on our support page.

EdTech Tools & Developers: Interested in creating a Classroom add-on? Express your interest via our form.

Please note that while individual add-on availability may vary by region or language, the add-ons feature will be available worldwide to Google Classroom users with the Google Workspace for Education Plus edition or Teaching & Learning upgrade.

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