Google Announces Major Hardware and Software Updates for the Education Market

At BETT 2024 in London this week, Google announced major updates across Google Education, Google Workspace, Chromebook, and more.

“We’re always working to bring the best technology to educators, students, and leaders around the world,” Google vice president Shantanu Sinha writes. “To kick off 2025, we’re sharing a slew of new updates coming to Google Workspace for Education and Chromebooks this year.”

There is indeed a ton of news, so here’s a high-level overview of some of the more notable announcements.

Class tools. Coming soon to Chromebooks with Google Workspace for Education Plus, Class tools provides remote control capabilities that let educators share content with students, remotely view student screens, share student work with the entire class, and use live, real-time language translation capabilities for the students that need it.

NotebookLM. Google’s AI-powered notebook is coming to the education market, where it can be grounded in trusted information such as research papers, education standards, lecture notes and course readings. Students can use it to answer questions and generate summaries, lesson plans, study guides, discussion questions, and quizzes, with in-line citations. There are also audio overviews and interactive audio discussions.

Google Vids. This video creation tool helps students and educators storyboard and then create videos using Gemini AI and simple prompts.

Gemini in the side panel. Gemini AI capabilities will be available in the side panel of Workspace Educations apps, along with seven additional supported languages.

Face control for Chromebooks. This recently announced accessibility feature lets users control their Chromebooks with head movements and facial gestures.

Chromebook Plus. Chromebook Plus comes to education for those 18 and older with Help me write, Help me read, generative image creation for video backgrounds, Live Translate captions for video calls with support for over 100 languages, AI-powered transcriptions in Recorder, new admin controls, and more.

Google Lens in Chrome. You can use this new feature to search for anything you seen on the screen, including text, images, and videos.

Over 20 new Chromebook and Chromebook Plus devices for the education market. Google’s hardware partners are releasing over 20 new Chromebook and Chromebook Plus devices for educators and students in 2025. Key among them are the Acer Chromebook Spin 511 and the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 2-in-1 (14-inch).

Chromebox OPS. A sort of ChromeOS Flex for flat panel displays, Chromebox OPS is a plug-in for LG, SMART, Promethean, AOpen, Satsuki, and Viewsonic flat panels and smartboards that transforms them into a ChromeOS-based device. It starts shipping this month, with more information available soon.