To help teachers and students learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix is making a handful of documentaries available for free on its Netflix US YouTube channel. At the moment, there are 10 documentary films and series available, including 13th, Babies, Chasing Coral, Knock Down the House and Our Planet. Each comes with educational resources, like discussion questions, ways to take action and more info. Netflix says it plans to add Q&As with some of the project creators soon.

For years, Netflix has allowed teachers to screen documentaries in their classrooms. Now that classrooms are virtual, it makes sense to share some of that content online. Even with that precedent, Netflix doesn’t make content available for free very often, so this is a bit unusual. Of course, you don’t have to be a student or teacher to view these through the Netflix YouTube channel.

The exact worries vary, although they tend to be a mix of tangible security and privacy problems with teachers and staff who may not be familiar with how Zoom works. There’s no end-to-end encryption for Zoom meetings, making it possible to intercept videoconferences. Teachers have also had to grapple with “Zoombombing” incidents where bad actors disrupt virtual classes — sometimes by guessing the meeting number, sometimes because staff share the meeting details on public sites. Add vulnerabilities and people uploading videos to unprotected websites and it may be all too easy for a determined intruder to spy on calls or collect recordings.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Zoom reiterated that it takes privacy and security “extremely seriously.” It said it had been “proactively engaging” to outline best practices and policies, and pointed out changes taking effect that require waiting rooms for K-12 classes and limit who can share data by default. These should help, but they’re clearly coming too late for some schools. They’ve had untrustworthy experiences with Zoom, and they’re unlikely to come back in the near future even if all their complaints are addressed.

The company says its originality reports will scan student work for matching text against web pages as well as “tens of millions” of books. “We’ve heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend a lot of time giving feedback about missed citations and improper paraphrasing. By integrating the power of Search into our assignment and grading tools, we can make this quicker and easier,” wrote Brian Hendricks, a Product Manager for G Suite for Education, in a press release.

Luckily for students, the new software isn’t solely for the teacher’s benefits. Students can run up to three originality reports on their own before they submit their assignments. This gives kids a chance to remove any instances of plagiarism they didn’t catch in earlier drafts of their writing. Teachers will receive their own originality report after students submit that will also flag uncited text, as well as any paragraphs with high similarity to other texts.

Given that an entire generation of students learned to rely on the search engine in lieu of developing traditional research skills, one can’t ignore the irony in this latest Google venture. Google joins a wide field of online plagiarism tools, many of which use the Google API to search the web for similar text. Both TurnitIn and Grammarly also crawl online databases of academic papers. TurnitIn also compares papers against a massive database of papers already submitted by other students. Google’s foray into the anti-plagiarism space makes sense, especially as it continues to develop tools for educators. Teachers can sign-up for the beta version of Assignments, which will go live later this fall on G Suite for Education.

The tool is meant to support students learning to read and/or translate, as well as students with reading challenges. Microsoft has previously put it to use in other platforms, like Office. The tool should be ready for Minecraft: Education Edition by the start of the school year this fall. Microsoft has a few other changes in store — like a single sign on feature — meant to make the program easier for teachers and students to use. If you don’t want to wait through the summer, you can sign up now to beta test the new features.

It’s likely Microsoft will have even more to announce at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Philadelphia next week. As ZDNet reports, the company is making Immersive Reader available as an Azure Cognitive Service. That will allow developers to add AI capabilities like speech recognition and sentiment analysis to other applications, so we could see more apps adding Immersive Reader features.