Google is celebrating Teacher Appreciation Day with a special gift for educators.

The Web giant on Tuesday unveiled Classroom, a free tool in the Google Apps for Education Suite that aims to make teachers' lives a little easier and more organized. In development for the past year, Classroom is designed to help quickly create and organize assignments, provide feedback, and communicate with classes.

"Classroom is based on the principle that educational tools should be simple and easy to use, and is designed to give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn," Classroom Project Manager Zach Yeskel, wrote in a blog post.

The tool, available now in preview, integrates Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail to help you create and collect assignments without wasting paper. Teachers can see who has and has not completed their work and provide direct feedback to individual students. It also lets them make announcements, ask questions, and comment with students in real time.

Classroom should also help teachers and students stay organized. It automatically creates a Drive folder for each assignment and student, and pupils can see what's due on their assignments page. Classroom is also free of ads and Google won't use your content or student data for advertising purposes.

Late last month, Google announced that it has stopped scanning the Gmail messages of those with Google Apps for Education accounts. Google did not display ads to Gmail education users, but it still scanned their accounts for use on other services. That has now stopped, and Google said it will eventually extend the same courtesy to business, government, and legacy users.

"As a former high school math teacher, I know all too well that teachers spend a ton of valuable time doing things other than teaching — waking up early to grade quizzes, collecting and returning piles of paper assignments, and battling copy machine paper jams," Yeskel wrote. "But with today's technology it doesn't have to be this way."

Google is already working with more than a dozen pilot schools and universities test out Classroom. Those interested in using the tool can apply now, and Google will open it up to a "limited number" of educators next month. By September, the tool will be available to all schools using Google Apps for Education.

For more on Classroom, check out the video below.