Quizlet, Duolingo, and more can add new Google Classroom features to their sites
Google Classroom debuted last year to help teachers and students save time and collaborate with each other, and since then Google developers have been working on [1] how to make sure it worked well with other products that educators love and use in their classes.
Now, developers can embed the Google Classroom share button and sign up for the developer preview of the Google Classroom API.
These tools make it easy for developers to seamlessly integrate with Google Classroom in ways that help teachers and students — like letting teachers create assignments directly from Quizlet, Duolingo, PBS and many other favorites.
Classroom API
The Classroom API allows admins to provision and manage classes at scale, and lets developers integrate their applications with Classroom. Until the end of July, Google will be running a developer preview, during which interested admins and developers can sign up for early access. When the preview ends, all Apps for Education domains will be able to use the API, unless the admin has restricted access.
By using the API, admins will be able to provision and populate classes on behalf of their teachers, set up tools to sync their Student Information Systems with Classroom, and get basic visibility into which classes are being taught in their domain. The Classroom API also allows other apps to integrate with Classroom.
A few developers have been helping Google test the API. Here are a few examples of what they’ve built:
- The New Visions CloudLab (makers of Doctopus) built rosterSync for Sheets, an add-on integrated with Classroom. Harnessing the power of Google Sheets, admins can sync data from any student information system with Classroom.
- Alma, a hybrid student information and learning management platform, will let schools easily create and sync their class rosters directly to Classroom with just a few clicks. And if an admin adds a student to a class in Alma, that student will get automatically added in the Classroom class. See more in their demo video.
- And if you use Pear Deck, it’s now easy to start an interactive Pear Deck session with any of your Classroom classes. Just click “Invite from Google Classroom,” choose a class and your students will automatically be invited. Pear Deck will always use your current roster of students from Classroom, so you don’t have to keep rosters up to date across apps.
In the Admin Console, admins will be able to restrict whether teachers and students in their domain can authorize apps to access their Google Classroom data. And Google doesn’t permit other apps to use Classroom data from the API for any advertising purposes.
Classroom share button
Google also introduced the Classroom share button, a simple way for developers – or schools – to allow teachers and students to seamlessly assign or turn-in links, videos and images from another webpage or product.
The share button only requires a few lines of JavaScript, and you can customize the button to meet the needs of your website. When teachers and students click the button, they can quickly share to Classroom without having to leave the site they’re on. More than 20 educational content and tool providers have already committed to integrating the Classroom share button, including PBS, Quizlet, American, Museum of Natural History, Discovery Education, Duolingo, and TIME Edge.
To get started or learn more about either the API or integrating the share button, visit developers.google.com/classroom [2].
Material from a press release was used in this report.