Google Classroom Guardian Summaries

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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

Screencast on Chromebooks

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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.

Adobe Acrobat Chrome Extension

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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.

Mote

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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.

Trelson for Staff

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Teachers can set their own exams using the Trelson (previously ChromEx) platform for their students to access on a Chromebook.

There are some great benefits to using Trelson:

  • You can set it up yourself to be run in your lesson, no need to ask MIS to set anything up
  • Chromebooks are ‘locked’ so students can’t access the internet
  • Students can log in with their normal details so no need to remember an extra login
  • At the end of the exam, the work is instantly saved into the Google Drive of the teacher who set up the exam

Setting up an exam

Teachers can just head to this link and log in with their college Google account to get started – https://assessment.trelson.com/#/exams

Full instructions on Trelson can also be found in this presentation.

Note – The video below hasn’t been updated since Trelson was rebranded from ChromEx but the method remains the same. Just the colours and branding may differ.

How does a student take the exam?

A student just needs to select ChromEx in the bottom left of the Chromebook BEFORE logging in.

Then when they are asked to log in to the ChromEx platform, the just need to use their normal college Google credentials.

Google Classroom (Android App)

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The Google Classroom Android App is the best companion app for the Google Classroom system.


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Adobe Scan

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Adobe Scan is a mobile document scanner that can turn anything into an Adobe PDF.

With Adobe Scan, easily capture and convert documents, forms, business cards, and whiteboards into high-quality Adobe PDFs. And with different capture modes, you can ensure that you capture the clearest scan every time.

Fast and easy signatures and form filling.

Eliminate the hassle of finding a printer, filling a form by hand, and scanning it again. Use Adobe Scan to turn paper forms into interactive digital documents you can easily fill out, sign and share.

Intelligently cleaner and clearer scans.

Using Adobe Sensei, Adobes powerful AI, Adobe Scan identifies and sharpens handwritten or printed text, while removing elements you don’t want, like glare and shadow.

Share scans from anywhere.

Scans are stored in Adobe Document Cloud so they’re easy to access, share, or upload directly into emails.

Using Adobe Scan and Google Classroom

The video below will quide you through installing the app and uploading your first scan to Google Drive, which you’ll then be able to upload to Google Classroom.

We’ll take you through the steps below too:

  1. Open the Adobe Scan app.
  2. Press the Camera icon.
  3. Place what you want to scan in view of your device camera.
  4. Wait while the app detects the page and content, when it’s done that it will automatically take an image of it.
  5. When the image has been taken, you can drag the borders around the page to more accurately outline a page.
  6. Once happy with the image, press Continue.
  7. Repeat steps 3-6 until you have scanned everything that you need to.
  8. Press the small image of your last scan in the bottom right corner.
  9. Scroll through the pages and make any visual adjustments you wish.
    1. You can crop out unwanted bits, reorder the pages or change the coloring to make it easier to read. You can also use the Cleanup feature to remove unwanted blemishes in the image.
  10. Once happy, press Save PDF.
  11. The app will now prepare the final PDF for you.

Now to upload this to Google Drive.

  1. On the screen with your PDF, press Share.
  2. Press Share a Copy.
  3. Locate and press Save to Drive or Google Drive.
  4. Enter a name for the file, select which account to save it to and where to save it then press Save.

Now to add to Google Classroom.

  1. Open the class you want to upload this to in Classroom.
  2. Locate and open your assignment.
  3. Click on Add or create.
  4. Select Google Drive.
  5. Locate and select your new PDF.
    1. If you have just uploaded it, you should find it easily in the Recent tab.
  6. Click Add.
  7. Now, if that’s all you need to do for that assignment you can hand it in.

Sribbl

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Scribbl is an online transcript creator for Google Meets. It’s simple to use, once you’ve signed, you just add Scribble as a member of the Meet session and it will automatically transcribe everything that is said in your Meet.

Their FAQ page has a tonne of information to help you see if this is right for you – https://www.scribbl.co/faq

It’s Easy

Step 1: Create a free Scribbl account
Step 2: Launch a Google Meet
Step 3: Copy/Paste Google Meet call in details into Scribbl Home Screen
Step 4: Click “Join Scribbl to Call”

Pricing

You get 240 minutes for free, that can be a number of small sessions or one big meet that you want transcribed. After you’ve hit 240 minutes you can purchase more minutes. It works out roughly 3p per minute but you need to purchase them in chunks of 120 minutes and upwards.

Google Classroom

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Google Classroom is an online learning platform for schools and colleges that aims to simplify creating, distributing and marking assignments in a paperless way. Google Classroom is designed to help students and teachers communicate, collaborate, organise and manage assignments, go paperless, and much more! Classroom also seamlessly integrates with other Google tools like Google Docs and Drive.

Improved Communication – Teachers can create assignments, send announcements, and instantly start class discussions. Students can share resources with each other and interact in the class stream or by email. Teachers can also quickly see who has or hasn’t completed the work, and give direct, real-time feedback and grades.

Better Organisation – Students can see assignments on the To-do page, in the class stream, or on the class calendar. All class materials are automatically filed into Google Drive folders.

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Workbench

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Workbench hosts a huge range of features. Whether you’re looking for some pre-made lessons on a specific topic or want to find some basic tasks for your lesson, you might want to track your student progress visually or learn code yourself there is a wealth of content across the site. Plus, it’s free for education!

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