Over the last seven days Google has made a few announcements that educators should note. The most significant of those announcements came today with the news of Classroom by Google. Classroom by Google is a new tool designed to help teachers organize workflow inside of Google Apps for Education. Within Classroom by Google teachers will be able to distribute assignments, create folders for students, and push announcements to students. It seems to do most of what can be accomplished by using scripts like GClassFolders and Doctopus. Classroom by Google is not available to everyone yet, but you can register for early access here.

Another announcement of note over the last week is that of the elimination of ad scanning in the Gmail accounts of Google Apps for Education users. Along the same lines, Google removed the option for domain admins to enable advertising within the domain (I don’t know of any admins that turned that on anyway).

Finally, this week Google Documents received an update that added the option to crop images and add borders to them. This is very similar to the existing image editing options in Google Presentations. (It appears that image editing in Documents has not been rolled-out to all domains, yet).