Back to School with G Suite
Are you a Google guru? Do you love using G Suite in your class to share assignments and keep students up to date? In our first post for the new school year, we are going to look at some new (and not so new) updates to the G Suite apps so you can hit the ground running this September.
CLASSROOM
Classroom is a great application in order to keep all of your assignments and documents in a single location for students and yourself. By using Classroom, teachers can easily share files with students, and students can ask one another questions or submit their work to the teacher. It is a great way to communicate and stay in contact as a class even when you are not in school.
After you create a new class in Classroom, you will notice that there is now a new tab called “Classwork.” Here, you can create topics and arrange your assignments and questions into the desired topic.
So, we can create a topic called “GSuite Updates,” and then add a question.
When you are adding a question, in order to organize it into the correct topic, click on Topic next to Due Date in the middle of the page, and select the correct one. This will automatically place the question in the topic section.
If you have several assignments or questions in a topic, you can arrange them by clicking on the three dots and choosing to move it up or down.
Adding topics to your Classroom is a great way to organize the assignments and questions so students can easily stay on track. If you have multiple units in a semester, you can create a new topic for each unit so all of the work is easily found and does not get “lost” on stream.
Another new feature of Classroom is the ability to copy a class. To do this, on the main page, click on the three dots and select copy. This will copy everything from the class except the roster and announcements. Copying a class is a great way to reuse a class and all of the assignments you have created previously. Although all of the assignments and questions have been copied over, they have not been assigned, so the students will not see them until you edit the preferences and officially assign them on/to a specific date.
In order to stay up to date on new releases in Classroom, you can alway click on the question mark in the bottom right hand corner and select What’s New to see the newest updates.
DOCS
A great new feature in Docs is the ability to set an expiration time for documents. This will allow you to keep a document available to students for a set amount of time before it expires and they no longer have access. To set an expiration date, go to the Share settings, advanced and then the edit button for the select person/group. You can then select whether you want access to the document to expire in 7 days, 30 days, or on a select day.
SLIDES
Another fairly new feature found in Slides is the ability to link between slides within the presentation. This is a great if you have different sections in presentation and want to be able to jump between slides easily. To link between slides, you will highlight the text you want to hyperlink, and then click on the hyperlink button. Next, you will click on Slides in this presentation, and then select the correct slide. Now, when you click on the text, you are automatically brought to the chosen slide. You can also use this feature to create your own story by following our post here.
EXPEDITIONS
In May, Google released Expeditions AR, which allows you to view items in augmented reality and 3D right in front of you (must be viewed through a device). In order to use Expeditions AR, you will need to have a device that is ARCore enabled. We will be releasing a blog post specifically on Expeditions AR and VR along with video demonstrations in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, use our Expeditions Search Tool to find out what is available and search for Expeditions by location, grade and subject.
