Google Classroom Guardians allows teachers to invite parents or guardians to receive email summaries about their student’s progress in class. These summaries include information about missing and upcoming work, as well as announcements and other class activity.

Key Points for Teachers:

  • Enables communication: Guardians stay informed about their student’s work without needing direct access to Classroom.
  • Easy to set up: Teachers can invite guardians directly from their Classroom, and guardians simply accept the invitation via email.
  • Privacy focused: Summaries don’t include grades, and guardians can’t view students’ actual work.
  • Customisable: Teachers can choose whether to send daily or weekly summaries.
  • Promotes engagement: By keeping guardians in the loop, it can encourage more involvement in their student’s learning.

Overall, the Guardians feature is a useful tool for teachers to foster communication and collaboration with parents or guardians.

To add

Below are instructions on how to set this up.

Need any assistance, email helpdesk@barton.ac.uk


Put simply, KAMI is an online PDF annotation, markup and editor tool. You can highlight, underline, and strikethrough text in PDF and other document formats. You can also add text boxes, shapes, and images.

Kami also works with Google Drive and Google Classroom. With Kami, you can easily collaborate on documents in the classroom while avoiding the hassles of printing documents.

The feature we love the most is the ability to mark your whole class work in one go with the Classroom integration.

Key Features and Info

Split & Merge PDF’s with KAMI

Record, trim, share, and viewtranscribed screencasts with the new Screencast app on Chrome OS.

Make video creation capabilities available to everyone in your class with the Screencast app built into Chrome OS. Educators can record, trim, transcribe and share lessons or demos to build a custom library of recordings. Students can create their own screencasts to share their ideas and what they’ve learned, or access lessons if they missed a class or need homework help. You can even draw or write on the screen using a touchscreen or stylus to diagram or illustrate key concepts. Recordings are stored on Google Drive, and can be accessed via link to the Screencast app – at college or from home. The new Screencast app will be available on Chrome OS M103.

Google Voice is a cloud-based phone service allowing you to make calls using any device from any location.



Google Voice is a cloud-based voice over IP (VoIP) phone service that is available as part of Google Workspace and includes:

  • Close integration with Gmail and Google Calendar;
  • Make calls from any device whether it’s a Chromebook, PC, or mobile phone;
  • Manage your calls with personalised settings for forwarding calls, text messages and voicemail;
  • Advanced voicemail transcriptions that you can read in the app and/or have sent to your email;
  • Supports ring groups for shared team and departmental numbers;
  • Easy to configure auto-attendant.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is the college migrating to Google Voice?
We are planning to migrate to Google Voice on Tuesday 1st June 2021.

Will I still have the same phone number?
If you currently have a direct dial number this will be ported to Google Voice so you can continue to use the same number.

What will happen to internal extensions?
Internal extension numbers such as 2224 will no longer exist. Each Google Voice user or room phone will have a full UK number.

How will I make calls?
If you currently have a personal extension number you will be assigned a Google Voice license enabling you to make calls using your Chromebook, Windows 10 PC, or mobile phone. You can request a headset if you don’t already have one.
Alternatively, if you currently share a phone extension with other members of staff you will continue to share a phone and make calls using a new handset.

How will I receive calls?
To receive a call you must have Google Voice opened in Chrome. You will then receive a notification in Chrome and your computer will ring when for incoming calls.
If you have the Google Voice app installed on your mobile phone or have a shared deskphone then your phone will ring as normal.

What happens if I miss a call?
Google Voice will automatically email you if you miss a call. If the caller leaves a voice mail this will be transcribed and emailed to you along with a link to play back the message.

Can I keep my current phone handset?
Existing Toshiba handsets will no longer function and will be removed. Shared phones such as department workrooms and some support staff areas will have a new handset installed.

How can I lookup a phone number?
Numbers can be searched for in Google Voice or Google Contacts.

Where can I find more help with Google Voice?
Browse the Google Voice online help for more support and guidance or contact the IT Services team.

Can I use Google Voice on my mobile device?
Google Voice works great on mobile devices. It enables you to make calls from a college number whether at home or on campus. Download Google Voice the Android and iOS apps.

Edpuzzle allows you to build a video bank from a number of places across the internet which you can then share with your class.



Edpuzzle also allows you to track who in your class has actually viewed the video. Perfect for Flipped Learning, you could assign the video for the students to watch before or after class then check to see if the students are viewing the material or not.

The Chrome extension adds a small button on to the page of a YouTube video when you watch one, when you click it you can then add it to your Class and add your own voice over, interactive questions or annotations if you want students to really focus on a certain section or idea.

The best part? It’s free for educators! Like the sound of all this? Check out Edpuzzle user Ms Oudiz uses it to improve her students essay writing skills as well as checking out the Edpuzzle blog posts where some of the posts are written by education experts as guest writers.

Edpuzzle Blog:

Preparing Students for Standardized Testing
Discover our tips to reduce test anxiety and build confidence!

A Core Tool During the Coronavirus Closures
Discover how to use Edpuzzle for remote learning with these top tips from Adam Hill, an edtech expert whose school has been closed due to the coronavirus.

The Ultimate Beginners Guide to a Flipped Classroom
Interested in flipping your classroom but don’t know where to start? Check out our guide and learn how you can flip your first class tomorrow!

5 Ways to Reach Introverted Students
Reach introverted students with technology and discover these useful tips to help make your classroom as inclusive as possible!

4 Tips for Teaching Public Speaking
Take your students’ presentation skills to the next level with our list of tips and tech tools!

How to use Podcasts in the Classroom
Learn how they spark student engagement and get some examples you can start using with your students today!

We wanted to remind everyone about the importance of keeping your Chromebook up to date. Generally, keeping any device up to date is for the best. Whether it’s your Apple Mac, Windows Laptop, or Smartphone, updating your devices ensures you get the most up-to-date security patches and any of the latest features. Keeping your devices up to date helps to keep your data safe.

Before the half term, we saw a rise in classroom issues with Chromebooks, such as projectors not displaying what’s on the screen or the speakers not playing sound from Chromebooks. 9 times out of 10 these issues were resolved by running a quick update on the Chromebook. Whilst it can be a little frustrating that Google release updates so often, every week or two, it is important that you run them. The vast majority of the time the update will automatically download to your Chromebook as soon as it’s available, you will then have a notification telling you to restart to update.

You can see in the screenshot example above, it’s nice and easy to see that you’ve got an update. Just look for the little arrow in the circle to the left of the time. Just click on that, or the time, to access your notifications and the update will always be the first one visible in the list. Just click Restart to Update, it may take a couple of minutes to restart your Chromebook and apply the update but not only are you getting the latest security patches, you’re also avoiding any delays with the start of your lessons.

If something isn’t working as expected on your Chromebook, in the first case it’s best to check for an update before anything else. Even if there isn’t an update available it would be a good idea to at least restart your Chromebook.

You can check for updates yourself by clicking on the time, click the Settings cog, click About Chrome OS and then click Check for Updates.

A couple of days ago Adobe announced a big update to the Google Chrome Acrobat Extension. We now have basic editing capabilities for PDF’s. Some of the functionality you’re used to on Acrobat on a PC can now be completed on your Chromebook.

There’s a lot of waffle in the article so we’ll list the key features below but you can read the full article here if you wish.

  • Rotate, delete, or reorder PDF pages
    • You can also merge multiple PDF documents together. Or split a document into smaller documents.
  • Convert from PDF
    • Convert from PDF to a Word, Excel or Powerpoint document, webpage or a JPG.
  • Comments, markups and highlights
  • E-Signatures and Form Fields
    • No more printing, completing by hand then scanning back in.

Some of these features are free which means you can do these on your personal devices, others fall under the college’s Adobe subscription so as long as you sign in with your Barton Peveril account you’ll be able to use them.

If you haven’t got it already, you can add it from the Chrome Web Store. 

This was announced on the Adobe Blog on October 12th.

Noted is a fully-integrated audio recording and note-taking app.
What does that mean though?



Noted allows you to type out notes as well as recording audio clips to link with your notes meaning it’s easier to keep everything neat, tidy and together. If, for example, you record a whole lecture or class talk, everything you type is time-stamped so you know what point of the audio clip was happening as you typed. You can also add a little #TimeTag on specific points so you can easily jump back and forth between key pieces of information you want to make sure you don’t forget. Then you can also link specific pieces of text to those #TimeTags to join written notes and audio notes together more.

It means you’re boosting your productivity by having all your notes in one place and with audio notes you get to keep the context of what you’re trying to note. You don’t have to miss anything anymore.

All this is completely free! 

Noted only works with Apple products, but it does that seamlessly across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch so you can just record a quick note on your Watch and it will automatically be synced to your Mac for when you need it. The same with your phone, if you’re out and about just open your phone and record a quick message or type a quick note and you’ll be able to get it on your Mac almost instantly.

There is also a Noted+ extra subscription if you like it enough. This extra includes dictation so you can turn your spoken words into written notes, it includes improved quality, background noise reduction and better exporting tools among other things. The best feature of Noted+ is that it includes Intelligent Playback so with that turned on, when it’s playing your notes back to you it will automatically skip and silence or background noise and only play you the important bits. Noted+ is $24 a year, roughly £17, at the time of writing.

Screencastify is the #1 screen recorder for Google Chrome. Capture, edit and share videos in seconds.



Screencastify is a Google Chrome extension that is available from the Chrome web store. It enables you to create screencasts and videos on a Windows, Mac, or Chromebook. In addition to recording your screen, it combines annotation tools, record from your microphone for voice over, and you can record yourself with a picture-in-picture overlay of your webcam. Everything you record is saved to Google Drive so you can easily share the video with students, embed it on a Google Site, or upload to YouTube.

You can use Screencastify to create recorded lessons, tutorials, or giving feedback. It is often quicker and easier to convey how to do something in a video, rather than writing a long list of steps. To see an example of Screencastify in action view my video below.

Read more

Mote lets you record a quick comment in Google Docs. It’s tagline is; the faster, friendlier way to comment on docs.


The mote Chrome extension makes it easy to add voice note feedback for students within Google Docs, Google Classroom, Slides and Sheets. You can quickly add a comment in simple terms without having to worry about how it may come across in the written word.

mote’s mission is to make document collaboration faster, friendlier and more powerful.

Online Courses

CourseTime to completeBenefitsWhat you’ll learn
Mote Certified Educator20 minutesBadge and certificateBecome familiar with all of Mote’s features. You just need to get at least 12 out of 15 questions right and there is video help too.