Google Classroom gets multiple teacher support, announcement/assignment drafts, more

Google has today announced several updates to Google Classroom, including the ability to add more than one teacher to a Classroom class, and new automatically-saving drafts for class announcements and assignments…

The biggest update here is definitely support for more than one teacher for classes, as outlined by the Google for Education blog:

Whether it’s a substitute, a teacher’s aide or a department chair, almost every teacher and professor is supported by other educators. So starting today, you can have multiple teachers in a Classroom class. To try it out, just go to your class’s About page and click “Invite teacher.” 

Google says that teachers that are invited to a class will be able to do most things that the original teacher can do, including create assignments and announcements, view and grade submissions, invite students to the class, and more. The only thing they can’t do is delete the class.

And this ties directly into the second big feature that’s being added. Now, all teachers—yes, including the additional ones that you’ve added to your class—can create drafts of assignments and announcements. Like Gmail, these will save as drafts automatically, and all class teachers can edit and assign these as they wish.

Google also announced a couple more features coming to Google Classroom, including autosaved grades and better notifications. Grades that teachers enter will be autosaved as they’re added, and now, both teachers and students will receive an email when a private comment is left on an assignment.

More Classroom news, Google says, is coming “before school’s out for summer.”