Google announced a BUNCH of updates to kick off the 2025 ISTE conference in San Antonio, TX. There are SO MANY updates that it took me a couple of days to digest them all.

In past years, many of the updates required a premium Workspace account. This year, I’m excited that Google is actually pulling some premium features down into the free tier! That’s great!

This blog post will give you a quick overview of the major 2025 Google updates along with a few thoughts and opinions from me.

Let’s kick things off with a quick visual overview. Here are the most important and interesting updates Google is announcing today.

Google Classroom is starting to shine!

Google Classroom continues to grow, mature, and get better. I’m especially excited about the AI integrations that are coming to Classroom. The Gemini integration for Classroom is similar to Magic School, with 30 “applets” that you can use to create a choice board, build a rubric, develop discussion prompts, etc.

This new feature is included for ALL Google Workspace for education domains! 🙌

For those of you with an EDU Plus license, you will really like expanded analytics which helps identify students who are disengaged or struggling.

Bring AI into your Classroom this year

If you haven’t spent time using Gemini or NotebookLM, get after it!

Related Post: Introducing NotebookLM: An AI-powered Tool for Students and Teachers

These two tools are taking a HUGE step forward by integrating directly into Google Classroom. This FREE feature will allow you to turn all of your course material into a Notebook, generate audio summaries, and share custom Gems to help students safely engage with AI.

You can check out my review of NotebookLM here and get a full overview of the latest features of Gemini here.

Chrome up your classroom!

Earlier this year, Google announced Class Tools, a new classroom management features custom designed for Chromebooks. We’re finally getting our first live look at this new feature and it looks pretty slick:

• Share links and resources directly to your students
• Lock student devices to a specific set of resources
• Disable student Chromebooks
• Enable live translation and transcription

To use Class Tools both students and teacher must be using a Chromebook and your district must upgrade to the EDU Plus tier of Google Workspace, which is rapidly becoming the best deal in education.

But wait, there’s more!

To wrap up this year’s 2025 Google updates, I’m excited that Google Vids is now FREE for everyone! Google Vids is a NEW video creation tool for Google Drive that feels a lot like Google Slides. Vids is a GREAT tool for students video projects! This is definitely a tool you should use in your classroom next year.

Related Post: First Look: Google Vids

Get the latest updates and tips on teaching with Google

Keeping up with the latest Google updates and features is a full time job! Let me sift through the noise so that you can focus on your students! The Google EDU Update is a free monthly newsletter with a quick summary of everything you need to know as a Google-using teacher!