Coronavirus: Tech Giants Launch New Online Teaching Resources

Google and YouTube have launched new resource pages to help teachers and families continue to educate students while they’re home from school due to the novel coronavirus.

Google’s page, called Teach From Home, offers recommendations on how teachers can teach remotely using Google products. Right now, the page features ideas like doing a video call with a class using Hangouts or creating an online quiz using Google Forms. The page will “continue to evolve,” according to Google.

There’s also a “Teach from Home toolkit,” which has resources about how to teach remotely organized into a series of slides.

Teach from Home is currently only available in English, but the downloadable toolkits are available in Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Polish, and Google says more languages are “coming soon.”

YouTube’s resource, Learn@Home, highlights educational YouTube channels that students can watch at home. The page categorizes the channels that are recommended for families with kids 13 and older, for families with kids five and older, and for families with preschoolers.

YouTube is partnering with Khan Academy and other education-focused creators on the effort and some channels highlighted include CrashCourse, Discovery Education, Cool School, PBS Kids, and Sesame Street.

Learn@Home is available now in English and will be available in Italian, French, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, and more “in the coming days,” according to YouTube. Google is also launching a $10 million Distance Learning Fund as part of the company’s $50 million contributions made through its philanthropic arm, Google.org, to COVID-19 response efforts. Google.org will first give a $1 million grant from the fund to Khan Academy to help it “provide remote learning opportunities to students affected by COVID-19 related school closures.”

The Verge