Online collaboration and communication has become exceedingly important during the ongoing pandemic across all domains including personal, professional, and educational. This is where Google Workspace for Education comes into play so schools can use the company"s suite of online tools to provide uninterrupted education to their students. Google has announced that Workspace for Education Plus now syncs with Student Information Systems (SIS) for schools in the U.S.
For those unaware, Workspace for Education Plus is Google"s most premium tier in its Education offerings, coming in at $5/student/year. It offers all the capabilities present in Standard as well as the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and adds features like Meet live streams for up to 100,000 in-domain viewers, personalized Cloud Search, and faster response times from Google support teams.
Now, Google is sweetening the pot further by allowing integration with SIS for schools in the U.S. IT admins can configure this via Clever, which will allow the syncing of rosters and the autonomous creation of Google Classroom courses. The benefits include teachers no longer having to manually set up classes and inviting students to them. That said, they can still choose to do so for individual Classroom courses if they want.
The feature is already in the rollout stage and will be available to everyone in the Workspace for Education Plus program within the next couple of days. It will be disabled by default for admins, who will have to enable the configuration via the Admin console and Clever. No action is required from teachers and students.