Google LLC today refreshed its portfolio of productivity tools for the education market with a slew of new online learning features headlined by improvements to Google Meet, its videoconferencing service.

Meet is included in the G Suite Education version of the search giant’s productivity suite, which is used by schools worldwide. G Suite Education also includes additional specialized products such as Google Classroom. Classroom alone had 100 million users as of this June, underscoring just how big a market education has become for Google’s productivity business.

The improvements to Meet announced today aim to enable more effective online teaching. The first big change will increase the number of class attendees who can appear on the screen at once to 49 participants. Later on, Google will add the ability to split classes into smaller “breakout rooms” for group discussions, a virtual hand-raising option that will let students indicate they have a question and a tool for making class recordings available to students who couldn’t attend live.

Classroom, the service that passed 100 million users in June, is receiving an update as well. Classroom is used by teachers to share assignments with students and grade submissions. Google is adding a to-do widget to the interface that can be used by both students to track outstanding assignments and by teachers to view items they need to grade. The search giant also promises improved plagiarism detection with new originality reports that will allow teachers to see if student submissions overlap with one another.

“Starting in a few weeks, originality reports will check submissions against a private, school-owned repository of past student work to look for student-to-student matches,”  Google group project manager Zach Yeskel wrote in a blog post. “Student submissions are automatically added when instructors use originality reports in Classroom.”

Besides updating existing services, Google today also added a new product to its education portfolio. It’s an app called Assignments that, as the name implies, aims to help teachers distribute coursework to student and grade student work.

Assignments speeds up coursework distribution with features that allow teachers to quickly create personalized copies of project documents for students. To speed up grading, the app provides features for automating oft-repeated tasks. “Assignments also simplifies the grading process with easy-to-use tools, such as comment banks that store your most frequently used feedback, reusable rubrics to keep grading consistent, and the ability to make direct margin comments, strikethroughs or highlights,” detailed Google project manager Brian Hendricks.

Google is launching Assignments today, while the new Meet and Classroom features will roll out over the coming months. The search giant is also planning a slew of smaller improvements across its education application portfolio including new user management features for teachers and school information technology administrators.

The updates were announced at the company’s School Anywhere virtual event today.

Image: Google