Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Google Classroom’s 10th Birthday: Jennifer Holland on Its Evolution and Future
Jennifer Holland is the Director of Program Management at Google for Education. With over 17 years at Google, she has been a pivotal figure in the development of Google for Education and Google Classroom. Jennifer has played a key role in shaping the tools that have transformed teaching and learning in K-12 and higher education.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- The history and inspiration behind Google Classroom and its early adoption in schools.
- How Google Classroom helped streamline teachers' workflows and reduce time spent on administrative tasks.
- The evolution of Google for Education, including the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and shifts in the education landscape.
- How AI is driving new innovations in Google Classroom, helping to elevate teachers' roles while personalizing learning.
- The global impact of Google Classroom and how the team integrates feedback from teachers around the world to continually improve the platform.
✨ Episode Highlights:
- [00:00:00] Jennifer Holland on Google’s mission: "more teaching, less teching."
- [00:02:28] The inspiration behind Google Classroom’s development.
- [00:03:50] A second-grade class inspired Classroom’s early design.
- [00:08:45] Google's strong support for education fueled Classroom’s creation.
- [00:11:35] AI’s role in enhancing personalized learning in Classroom.
- [00:17:14] Classroom’s global reach and adaptation for low-connectivity areas.
- [00:21:04] Jennifer reflects on 10 years of Classroom and its evolution through COVID-19.
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This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:00] Jennifer Holland: We had a mantra. It was more teaching, less teching. We actually had that across our shirts and people like, but you're Google and yeah, we're Google, but the whole point is to help transform teaching and learning and to empower educators who are so gifted and so talented and care so much. Both my parents are educators.
So I know firsthand, you know what it's like and how much they care. You're not going into teaching to make money. You're going into teaching because you want to make a difference in someone's life. And what gift could we give if we could help make it a little bit easier to connect with your students to save you a little bit of time so you can do something else with that.
[00:00:38] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll find it all
[00:00:56] Ben Kornell: here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.
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[00:01:22] Alex Sarlin: In this special episode for Google Classroom's 10 year anniversary, Ben talks to Jennifer Holland, the Director of Program Management at Google for Education. Jennifer is a veteran. Google employee. She's been there for 17 years since 2007 and has been through so many different aspects of the Google experience.
She started in Google for Education as a program manager in 2013 and became the director of program management in 2019. In this conversation, Ben and Jennifer talk about the impact that Google for Education has had on the education landscape.
[00:02:04] Ben Kornell: EdTech insiders. We are here with a special birthday episode with the one and only Jennifer Holland, director of program management for Google for education.
Welcome to the pod.
[00:02:17] Jennifer Holland: Thank you so much for having me. Where's your birthday hat?
[00:02:20] Ben Kornell: Well, I was going to bring all my noisemakers and I'm still waiting for the birthday cake, but it's not your birthday that we're celebrating whose birthday is it?
[00:02:28] Jennifer Holland: It's classrooms’ birthday.
[00:02:31] Ben Kornell: So in the year 2004, let's rewind this whole idea. 2004,
[00:02:37] Jennifer Holland: 2014, 20 years.
[00:02:40] Ben Kornell: Oh my gosh. Well this was when I was in the classroom and I feel like I, I feel like I was using my Google products in 2003, 2004, but yes.
[00:02:48] Jennifer Holland: And you were probably having a lot of pain points.
[00:02:50] Ben Kornell: That's right. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere, 2014 comes Google classroom. What was it like in those early days? Just bring us back to that product launch, what you were thinking at the time and a little of the story behind it.
[00:03:04] Jennifer Holland: Yeah. So I think it's really important to remember what was going on in education at that time. You know, we had. There's a small team that was spending a lot of time, but you know, trying to understand how our tools were being used in the classroom at the time.
It was apps for education or Google apps for education. I just heard another teacher referred to it as gaffey. And you know, you had some teachers that were trying to use this technology, primarily higher education institutions. And then you had some very eager K 12 teachers and administrators, and a lot were still using it.
paper and pen and battling the copy machine every single day. And that was something that we just heard over and over and over again, is I spend 45 minutes a day just trying to create and print out the assignments. And then I have to collate them and staple them. And that just took a lot of time away from what the teacher could, you know, spend doing with their students and planning, you know, for lessons.
And we also saw that Google apps for education was starting to take off again, primarily in higher education, but a lot of K 12 teachers wanted to use it, but it was really hard to actually get going to set up your class to, you know, create an assignment. Back then what you'd have to do, and I'm, Probably you remember this is like you have 20 to 30 students, you'd have to make a copy for each student share the permissions, you know, make sure that there's a drive folder and
[00:04:35] Ben Kornell: I was middle school. So I had 150 students. It was even more painful.
[00:04:40] Jennifer Holland: It's excruciating. And a few of us said, Hey, you know what? We probably could make this process a little bit easier. And what if we were able to add almost this glue and we used to have this product slide when we were trying to pitch, you know, to get engineering resources to build this.
It was an Elmer's glue that just tilted. It was, you know, old school Google slides, animation, pouring glue over our Google ops for education logo to stitch together the workflow. And you know, a catalyst was I was in a second grade class. I still remember it's Tracy T. Lander in Chicago Public Schools, and I was observing her class and she literally had six steps on the board.
They were pictures instructing her students who were just learning how to read, how to actually turn in an assignment. And like, it took at least 15 minutes for those students to turn in the assignment. And that is really valuable instructional time that we thought we could help with. So we sought out to create Google Classroom and it was really about making sure that it was easy to use our tools to save teachers time, to prevent teachers from having to go battle that copy machine every single day and streamline that assignment workflow.
So with a very simple make a copy button, we could distribute, you know, the number of assignments or docs for each student. And then we had a simple turn it in button for the student. So no more dog ate my homework. You know, I forgot it. It was very easy for a student to turn it back. And we really focus on the simplicity.
A classroom still today is very simple and easy to use. And that is. 100 percent intentional because we want everyone to feel like they can use it and get up and running. So classroom really set out to create and collect assignments paperlessly, make it easy to organize, so both keep the teacher and the student organized, and then hopefully improve class communication by streamlining some of those workflows.
So that was really on and I would say You know, while many on the team were former educators, we weren't in a classroom still. And as you know, things change minute by minute, and it's really important. And this is remained true for our entire journey of our team is that we work alongside schools and administrators and teachers and parents to make sure that what we're actually building is useful.
The last thing that we want to do is launch something that just either adds more time, um, Creates barriers, isn't representative of our user groups and our users and making it intuitive and easy to use. And so we started what was called, we call it school fooding at Google. It's a term called dog food.
I'm sure you've heard of it. We were like, we're not a school. Google's not a school, so we can't test with other Googlers. Let's test with schools. And so we started with three pilot teachers. And I visited their class every single day for two months as they were using what was codename homeroom. That's what we called it.
And actually in the product, we called it HR because we didn't want it to leak. We thought teachers are going to be really excited about this if they start using it. And we don't want it to leak prematurely. And so it was so funny because when you talk to students, they'd be like, yeah, HR does this. And you're like, no, no, no.
It's not like human resources. Like the scary HR. And so what we found was Nicole was our first pilot teacher. She taught ninth grade English and 11th grade English. And she had these, and we can send you pictures. She had these piles of just bags of paper and she'd spend 45 minutes. battling that copy machine.
And her school not only turned on Google app education and signed up, but they started piloting classroom. And it was unbelievable to see the transformation basically from the moment they started piloting both to see what happened in the classroom.
[00:08:45] Ben Kornell: On the Google side, was there ever any hesitation among leadership?
Like Oh, this could be controversial or we're getting into a space with educators and learners, or were they kind of like, well, we've already got the apps for education. This is the logical sense. What was that discussion like?
[00:09:02] Jennifer Holland: We've always had support, you know, I think at the base. And when you think about what Google is like, Google is an education company.
It's about getting access to information and make it universally accessible. And our founders, care so much about education and our executive team. And that has never wavered once. I think what we wanted to make sure was that what we were building was useful and that it wasn't adding more tech for the sake of tech.
We had a mantra. It was more teaching, less teching. We actually had that across our shirts and people like, but you're Google and yeah, we're Google, but the whole point is to help transform teaching and learning. Right. And to empower educators who are so gifted and so talented and care so much. I come from both my parents are educators.
So I know firsthand, you know what it's like and how much they care. You're not going into teaching to make money. You're going into teaching because you want to make a difference in someone's life. And what gift could we give if we could help make it a little bit easier to connect with your students to save you a little bit of time so you can do something else with that.
And so that was always. What really, you know, is sort of the motivation. And again, I mentioned a bit earlier is that we did have a lot of former educators who may have used, you know, Google apps for education at the time or didn't and wanted to make a difference. I would say early on though, you know, Google apps for education was for businesses and we just made the choice to give it away for free for schools, like without kind of just thinking about it, right?
We're like, great. If it gets adoption, awesome. And this is before all of us were on the team. And then we started seeing. apps for education getting adopted more widely across higher education. And then we started to see this adoption with K 12 teachers that were really excited about incorporating tech.
And at that time, it was like a bit controversial in terms of, are you using technology or using paper and pen? And so really what we were pushed on was like, what is this solving? How is it going to help increase. the teaching that's happening in the classroom and how is it additive? And that was really the focus.
And from then it was like off to the races. Like, how do you build this as quickly as possible? How do you make it as easy and simple to use? How do we make it, you know, it was free. Apps for education was free. So how do we continue to add value to schools? And I mean, the hardest part is there's so So many things you want to do, and you don't always have the engineering resources to do it.
So how do you prioritize?
[00:11:35] Ben Kornell: I talked to Shantanu about that a few months ago, and it does seem like those themes that you're talking about are especially relevant. Now you're talking about efficiency around clearing the space for the educator to do what only they can do. Now that we have AI here, Classroom is undergoing a new evolution.
Can you tell us a little bit about like what themes are kind of enduring and what's new and different?
[00:11:58] Jennifer Holland: I would say it is a huge paradigm shift. You know, AI is generally just how you think about the role in education. I would say Classroom, obviously we had like the initial launch years and it was about Supercharging in making, you know, replacing the copy machine.
And then we went through another big shift, which was COVID, you know, so we're not, it's not new AI is of course new, but it's been part of our sort of ethos, but this constant having to shift, like making big shifts from a product and engineering perspective is not new to us because COVID was a huge shift, right?
You all of a sudden overnight went from in school learning to everything is remote and that was. It was personally, you know, it was a huge responsibility. It was, you know, it was a gift, certainly. It was hard and it was hard for everybody. But we said, Hey, we have this opportunity to be the backbone, to help kids continue to learn because we know how important learning is and how can we help make it easy for teachers.
Right. To go through that moment. And I would say through that, we learned a ton, which is also helping us. Now, the most important thing is simplicity. You need to make sure that the teacher feels confident, capable can do it like that, you know, and it can't take up a lot of time because if you do, it's not going to work in the classroom, especially trying to get a bunch of students to also use it.
We also really focused on, and the same goes for You know, during the pandemic is how do we elevate teachers? How do we help save them time again, similar themes to when we started classroom, but it's changed, it's evolved to what the problem that we're going after, you know, we did tighter integrations with meat because we knew video conferencing was so important.
Meat was built for well intentioned adults. It was not built for kids trying to get out of school. Right. And so like, It opened up all these things that we needed to work with the meet team to build and like a tighter integration to make it easy for all your students in your classroom to be able to just jump into a meet, right?
We also saw, you know, and, and I'm sure, and I know you've talked a lot about this on your podcast is just the learning loss. Right. And that is huge. And so even coming out of COVID and the pandemic, you know, it was, are we in person? Are we hybrid? So we needed flexibility. And one of the things, again, simplicity, flexibility is key.
We've tried to remain, you know, flexible and continuing to evolve. You know, with sort of that mindset, but then, you know, in that hybrid world, you have some kids in school, you have some kids remote, you know, equity is a huge component as well. And so making sure that teachers feel equipped. And then, you know, on top of that, with the learning loss, there was like all these other things that we felt we needed to build and we could build to help support that.
So we have Read Along, which makes it easy. And it's now integrated into classroom. We just launched out as part of back to school, but read along was one of the applications during COVID where it leverages AI and speech to be able to coach students, you know, with their reading and learning how to read, which is so important, it's hard to provide that one on one coaching.
And so with that integration and insights. built into classroom. A teacher can now see, you know, how students doing and help provide additional reading assistance and support. There's also, you know, things like classroom analytics, which was also really important because education leaders, teachers, you know, at the district level, need to see how kids are doing, which kids need help and support and how can we provide that, you know, intervention.
And then, of course, then there's AI. So there's a long winded way of saying, you know, we're not this, like, next shift. And, you know, AI has definitely been, uh, core to how Google thinks. It's, it's part of our DNA. And it's not a new thing. I think that's the important thing for Google and for, uh, you know, our teachers and, and schools that are using our tools.
It's been in tools like spell check and, you know, spam blocking like 99 percent of our spam is is blocked because of our AI and ML capabilities, right? So we've thoughtfully incorporated the technology where it makes sense. And that is so true with education. And really what we're focused on with AI is how do we elevate that teacher?
How do we make sure the teacher is always in the loop so that the teacher can decide whether or not they want to use AI or whether, you know, hints are turned on in practice sets, which is, you know, one of the features within classrooms. So we've tried to be Stick to sort of our founding principles, you know, simplicity, flexibility, elevating the teacher, focusing on them and letting them being in control of their class and then helping them, you know, along the way.
[00:16:53] Ben Kornell: Yeah. As I look back and see the arc, there was like the efficiency value prop allows you then to enable the flexibility value prop. And now you're getting into the Insights where you're able to make teaching and learning better all powered by the teacher in the loop. But really that platform builds to that.
[00:17:14] Jennifer Holland: That was a much more insightful way of describing that, but that the insights are key and for the first time, really, you can start to personalize the learning at scale, which is like a dream.
[00:17:27] Ben Kornell: As somebody who's worked on that and would just kill for the kind of A. I. We have today back when I was doing it.
I think we all see the potential. And then, of course, the number of daily active users on your platform, both in the U. S. And globally is profound. Just can you talk a little bit about some of the global efforts that the team thinks about and works on? Not just in the U. S. K. 12 schools, but beyond.
[00:17:53] Jennifer Holland: I mean, we have a global footprint.
And we feel a great sense of responsibility. And part of that pilot program that I described involves educators and students globally, it's not just us. And that was something that we made sure from the get go, because there's different needs and each, not every classroom is created the same, even in the U S right.
And so you have to be able to, if you want to be. What we call like a toothbrush product toothbrush journey because you brush your teeth every day use it a
[00:18:23] Ben Kornell: little bit every day Yeah, it's
[00:18:24] Jennifer Holland: a little bit every day, but it needs to work for at scale, right? Yeah, so some of the things that we talked about is like in low connectivity Schools, you know having classroom work offline so we have mobile offline capabilities and then it can sync up and turn your assignment in when you get into you know, your school or a library You know, practice sets has been really widely adopted and people are really excited about because of the potential to be able to provide kind of that assistive learning experience while a student is completing the assignment.
Meet certainly during COVID was global and, you know, making sure that we did never go down, right? Like, I mean, there's so much that went into those first few months, but obviously it lasted much longer to support just the global education system and keep it up and running. And so, you know, we take feature requests from everywhere.
We have a send feedback button in all of our tools and all of the features that you literally. Click send feedback you type your feature across or hey, this doesn't work or whatever and it goes directly to our product teams and we one of the things, you know, it's something that I had started. I was the first classroom program manager.
So it's just me. I read every single piece of feedback for years. And it was so insightful because it's like, Oh, this doesn't work. Or, Hey, we're seeing, you know, this like set of requests come through, you know, pretty consistently. Maybe we should prioritize that higher on our roadmap. And so that. You know, sort of teacher in the loop, school in the loop, making sure we're incorporating educator and student feedback was so critical to, you know, how we built classroom, and it's so critical to how we continue to add features and functionality.
[00:20:16] Ben Kornell: Well, it's so cool on the 10th birthday of Google Classroom to be here. I mean, we're in building 1055 on the. Google Megaplex. And we're right next to Ben Gomes office for our listeners who don't know Ben. He used to lead Google search and now his focus is on learning. So I think it's a profound statement to say.
That Google has always been a learning company, always been education oriented. And you can see the physical manifestation of that here. And there's teammates on the Google for education team, really around the world. How has it felt to be part of that team journey from that small, you know, group in the corner, building out the Google for education apps and, and ultimately classroom to where we are today.
What's that journey been like for you?
[00:21:04] Jennifer Holland: Incredible. I think, you know, we talk a lot about the responsibility we have for schools, but my highlight, you know, professionally has been getting to work with my teammates and I, they are so brilliant and they are so capable and the attitude, like the passion for education and wanting to help.
I mean, that, Was always the case in the beginning. It shined so bright during COVID. And I mean, we were in our pajamas, it was just like a bunny. It's like, we got to keep schools up and running and it might be that we're working day and night and it was exhausting and everyone was burnt out at the end, but we all rallied around the sense of purpose and that has remained true, you know, from the get go.
But it's been incredible in the, in just being able to work with different educators, right? Like people who are giving their lives to support students and helping them thrive and, you know, going on this like personal, you know, bringing out the best of them is pretty amazing. And I would say the other thing is like there have been people on the team have been on the team for a really long time and everyone has, you know, you kind of go through life moments together as well.
And so it's been this amazing journey and I feel like we're just getting started. And I think the best part of Google is that in our team is that we get to bring the best of Google to schools in a way that makes sense for schools. And so you've got the power of Google behind you.
[00:22:37] Ben Kornell: It's so cool to hear the stories 10 years in and looking 10 years forward.
The OG, Jennifer Holland, co founder of Google Classroom. Dare I say,
[00:22:49] Jennifer Holland: there's a lot of people that were, I'm very
[00:22:51] Ben Kornell: liberal with that term Co-founder,
[00:22:54] Jennifer Holland: Yes.
[00:22:55] Ben Kornell: She is today director of program management for Google for education. Thanks so much for joining Edtech Insiders today.
[00:23:02] Jennifer Holland: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:23:04] Ben Kornell: Happy birthday.
[00:23:06] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more EdTech Insider, subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on substack.
