April 2024 developer updates
Google for Education Developer Announcements
✅ See our Preview the Classroom API guide for information about upcoming features and instructions on accessing and using them.
Reminders from last month:
Please take our quick 2-minute survey to share your feedback on our new Classroom API features. Your feedback helps us improve the API to meet your needs!
Grading Periods API, launching to public preview in the first half of 2024. See the grading periods article to learn more about the feature .
Rubrics API, available in public preview today. See the guide to get started.
Chrome has announced timeline updates for the phase out of third-party (3P) cookies. On January 4, 2023, Chrome introduced Tracking Protection, which restricts website access to 3P cookies by default, to 1% of users. The timeline for the complete phase out has shifted from the second half of 2024 to early 2025 and is tentative on agreements with regulators. We still recommend you see our guide to prepare for the deprecation and learn about the impact to add-ons and recommended mitigation measures.
The add-ons requirements have been revised. Several items have been removed, combined, rewritten for clarity, or made less restrictive. No action is required for already-published add-ons; these requirements will apply to all future add-on submissions.
Reminders from last month:
We’ve changed the behavior of the add-ons API when creating add-on attachments from your own site or product. Your add-on no longer needs to be allowed by an administrator or installed for this flow. We encourage you to adopt this flow if your users are accustomed to discovering content in your site, as the new behavior removes a barrier to user adoption. Users must still install your add-on for it to appear in the add-ons shelf when creating assignments, announcements, or materials in the Classroom UI.
As announced during BETT, Classroom add-ons will enter Developer GA later in 2024, meaning any developer will be able to build an add-on! In the meantime, we continue to invite interested developers to build an add-on while the API is in a closed state. If interested in building an add-on, you can express interest today by filling this form.
Please be advised of the following API changes this month:
The Course.courseMaterialSets field now exclusively returns an empty list. This field has been deprecated and read-only for several years, so we expect little impact on any production applications.
🎉 We've decreased the Classroom API p50 (median) latency by roughly 20% (~100ms)!
Please be advised of the following documentation changes this month:
Expanded the add-ons walkthroughs to cover creating add-on attachments from outside of Google Classroom.
Updated our guidance on Chrome's 3P cookie deprecation with the latest timelines.
Updated add-ons requirements.
Minor updates to developer guides.