What’s New in Google G Suite [October 2018]

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Catch up on every new feature added to Google G Suite for Education in October 2018.

Google Docs Activity Dashboard

Earlier this year, Google introduced an Activity Dashboard in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides that allows you to easily keep track of who has viewed a document and when they viewed it. This is especially useful for shared documents. For example, a teacher can check if a student has seen a file already and alert them that it’s been updated.

To access Activity Dashboard and see who’s viewed a file in Docs, Sheets, or Slides, click Tools > Activity Dashboard. The first page allows you to see the read status from users the document is shared with, as well as all users in college.

Google has added the Viewer Trend option, which is similar to Google Analytics. It enables you to specify a time range and see daily viewers on a graph, which is particularly useful for documents shared with a large number of people.

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Chromecast for Classrooms: A new tool for wireless screen casting and presentation coming to a room near you…

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Over the last year we have been investigating the use of classroom technology that might help reduce the dependency on Windows PCs. We also wanted to utilise Chromebooks better and enable teachers to wirelessly present to the classroom projector or screen. Various hardware and software screen casting solutions were considered, most of which were either too expensive or difficult to use. One potential solution was Google Cast for Education that is based on Google’s consumer Chromecast technology and is built into Chrome. While it didn’t require new hardware it did rely on having a classroom PC logged on and connected to the projector and it didn’t perform well on a large network. It did get us thinking about whether we could adapt a Chromecast for use in the classroom. After some trial and error we eventually found a good way of connecting Chromecasts to the College network in a secure and easily accessible way.

Wireless Casting with Chromecast

Chromecast is a new service we’re introducing to the projectors and screens in classrooms and meeting spaces. This screen casting service will allow:

  • Wireless connection to the screen – no need to fiddle with cables;
  • Casting from Chromebooks, tablets, and phones;
  • Cast just one Chrome tab or your entire screen.

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What’s New in Google G Suite [May – September 2018]

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Catch up on everything new in G Suite for Education from May to September 2018! We’ve had a few months off posting our monthly G Suite update so there are plenty of new features to learn about.

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Getting the most from Google Chrome

There’s a stunningly simple thing you can do with Google Chrome that can solve headaches and annoyances related to logging in to various google services, or not being able to see the printerpool printers.

If you’ve not already discovered, you are able to log into chrome itself with your google account. Once you’ve done this, everything that happens inside of chrome is done in the context of your user account. In short, this ensures that you get a consistent experience within chrome whether you’re using it at college, at home, on a chromebook, or on your phone or tablet.

All of our institutional plugins for chrome are automatically installed once you log in with your username / password; as well as the ability to print to college printers – to run that by you again, if you log into chrome on your phone, you can send work to print out from home, and simply walk up to a printer to release it the next morning.

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The Best Google Tips for Teachers from Google

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Google for Education Tuesday Tips!

Google G Suite for Education “Tuesday Tips” is a weekly spotlight on Google’s education tools. Unfortunately, we can’t take credit for this one. Google for Education #GoogleEdu share tips to help teachers with Google Classroom and Google Forms. These tips are released every Tuesday, and they come in the form of a published Google Slide deck (see embedded slides below).

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New Google Drive File Stream

Google Drive File Stream is a new desktop application that allows you to access your Google Drive directly from your computer and uses almost none of your hard disk space. With Google Drive File Stream, you stream your Google Drive files directly from the cloud to your PC or Mac, freeing up disk space and network bandwidth. Because the Drive files are stored in the cloud, any changes you or your collaborators make are automatically updated everywhere. You’ll always have the latest version.

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