Microsoft Classroom: Copilot for Teachers and Grading — Preview in 2027

⚡ The Gist in 5 Seconds

• Microsoft has built Classroom — a single window for assignments, grades, and classwork.
• The preview launches in early 2027; applications for administrators are already open.
• The service is included in Microsoft 365 A2, A3, A5, and A7 subscriptions at no extra cost.

🔍 What Happened

Microsoft unveiled Classroom — a school platform for elementary, middle, and high school. It lives inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The preview version launches in early 2027, and administrators can apply via the official registration page. Habr reports.

The mechanics are simple: instead of a dozen tabs — one entry point. Inside there are four core blocks: Classwork, Assignments (assignments), Grades (grades), and OneNote notebooks for classroom activity. Plus analytics reports. Teachers get an AI tool, Teach in Copilot, for planning the learning process, and a Study and Learn agent right in the Assignments section. Students get AI-based "Learning Activities." The dashboards differ: a student sees active and recently graded work, overdue items, and teacher feedback, while a teacher sees a grading queue and a list of upcoming assignments.

🧠 Our Take

Microsoft has never abandoned the education market: Teams for Education, OneNote, Azure school tenants. But all of this lived as a set of separate apps that schools glued together as best they could. Classroom is an attempt to bring them together into one product and put Copilot on top. Our assessment: this is less about pedagogy and more about keeping schools inside the subscription. A student and teacher who open one panel every day instead of five are less likely to switch to competitors.

For teachers, the main question is time. Lesson planning, grading, feedback: these are exactly the operations where an AI assistant can save hours per week. For students, it's more interesting. AI-based "Learning Activities" sounds like a personal tutor, but what's inside — the model, hints, task generation — is unclear from the announcement. We believe this is where Microsoft will have to answer uncomfortable questions about minors' data.

Who wins? Schools on Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 — they get Classroom at no extra cost, at least as claimed. Who loses? Small EdTech services for assigning and auto-grading work: their function is now being given away for free inside a subscription the school already has. Google with Classroom is the main competitor, and it has a ten-year head start.

⚠️ What We Don't Know

There are plenty of weak spots. There's no exact preview date — only "early 2027." Languages, regions, and whether Classroom will work in Russian schools are unknown. Not a word about which models power Copilot, where student work is stored, or whether it's used for training. Pricing for non-profit and private schools hasn't been named. All of this is a retelling from Habr; we haven't read Microsoft's official announcement, so details should be verified on the vendor's website.

Prediction: by mid-2027, Microsoft will announce the exact general launch date for Classroom and the list of supported languages. If neither is announced by then, the preview will drag on for at least another year.

Source: Habr