Throughout the pilot, the team interviewed teachers and students for feedback, but some of their biggest learnings came from just observing. “I noticed a group of students on their phones in Nicole’s class and thought, they’re definitely not paying attention,” says Jennifer Holland, a program manager on the Classroom team at the time. “We didn’t have an app and our prototype wasn’t mobile responsive, so we didn’t even consider they’d be doing their in-class assignment. Sure enough, they were accessing Classroom in their mobile browsers doing just that.”
When she asked why they weren’t using one of the many laptops in the room, one student told her, “I can swipe a lot faster than I can type.” “We immediately knew we had to prioritize getting a mobile app on the roadmap,” Jennifer says.
Google Classroom officially launched in August 2014 — an app would follow a few months later — as part of our Google Apps for Education suite, now Workspace for Education. In the 10 years since, it has grown from an assignment distribution system designed to save teachers’ time to a robust, AI-powered platform that lets them more easily create and distribute classwork, engage directly with students, keep parents and guardians abreast of progress and more. Along the way, the team has continued to work with schools around the world via the Google for Education Pilot Program to continue evolving as educators’ needs have changed. Today, more than 100 million teachers and students use Classroom globally.