Earlier I shared the exciting news that Google Classroom now lets you share daily and weekly activity summaries with parents. That wasn’t the only exciting Google Classroom feature that was rolled-out today. The Google Classroom mobile apps for Android and iOS now include an annotations option.

In the Google Classroom mobile apps you can now draw on, highlight, and write on top of students’ Google Documents, PDFs, and Microsoft Word documents. The iOS version of the app will also let you type on top of a document. With both apps students can annotate items that teachers have shared in Google Classroom and teachers can annotate items that students have shared back to them.

GIF courtesy of Google Apps for Edu marketing department.

Applications for Education
The new annotations feature in Google Classroom could be a great one to have students use to illustrate how to solve a mathematics problem or to label a diagram. You could also have students use it to highlight and show you that they can identify parts of speech in a document.

The annotations feature will also be helpful when you are correcting a student’s work. Use the pen tools in the app to write on a document much like you would if the document was printed and you were using a physical pen.