March 2 – BESC Staff & Early Adopters This group will have Gmail and Google Calendar running alongside their Outlook email. Staff have the option of working in either platform but it is recommended to use one in order to minimize confusion.
March 23 – All Staff & 9-12 Grade Students All users with existing PPS Email and Calendar services including students in grades 9-12 will be transitioned to Gmail and Google Calendar. After April 6, 2020, access to Outlook email and calendar will no longer be supported.
You can find all our monthly G Suite for Education #CopierPD tips here on the PPS G Suite for Education resource page. So far this year, tips have included multiple Chrome users and Google document URL tricks.
How to Manage Multiple Google Accounts
Check out this G Suite for Education tip, our first in a monthly series.
For a full tutorial and video from Shake Up Learning, visit this link. For your staff, download and print this poster and put it up next to your copier! #CopierPD
Google Classroom
Lots of confusion around Google Classroom as the failed Edupoint/Synergy Gradebook sync led us to opt-in all class sections for the Google Classroom/Synergy sync. Several teacher teachers are seeing duplicate sections and students are being kicked out of classrooms. Please know that our team is working hard to resolve these issues and strange one-off situations. Some good news: in October, any classes that have no activity and have not been accessed will automatically be archived. We have gotten reports of students accessing these empty Google Classrooms and posting comments and replies on the stream.
Netop Vision
We’ve received several reports about how kids are already getting around the screen sharing in Vision. Teacher and student devices must be on the same network. Students may choose another wireless access point after they’ve signed in to the Chromebook to sidestep screen sharing. There was also another report of students turning off notifications to bypass the screen sharing dialog box, but we haven’t been able to replicate that error. Check your teacher settings and the settings we’ve turned on here:
As the school year winds down, most teachers go through some sort of check-out procedure for their physical classrooms, making sure everything is properly organized or put away for the summer. In much the same way, you may want to do some clean-up and close-out steps for your digital classroom … Google Classroom.
Join us for another Camp Chromebook on Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at Northwest Regional ESD in Hillsboro, OR. This is a *free* professional learning opportunity for any educators interested in learning more about Google Apps and G Suite for Education tools and how to integrate them into your classroom instruction using best practices and relevant strategies. All levels welcome. Sessions will be posted on the website when the schedule is finalized.
We just got notice that we joined the Google Forms locked mode Quizzes beta. This is a unique opportunity for you all to pilot a new unreleased feature in this product. Please review the details for the beta below:
Locked Mode Quizzes in Google Forms Locked mode in Quizzes in Google Forms is a new way to keep students focused and distraction-free during tests and quizzes. Available only on managed Chromebooks, locked mode prevents students from navigating away from the Quiz in their Chrome browser until they submit their answers. Teachers can enable locked mode with a simple checkbox in Google Forms, giving them full control over assessments. For more information, check out the official blog post.
Feedback For locked mode Quizzes, we ask that you submit feedback through the “Send feedback” button in Forms. In the case where respondents are able to escape locked mode and open browsers during quizzes, please send us feedback using this form. We’d like to help resolve any issues as quickly as possible, so we appreciate the feedback.
In addition, throughout the betas you may be asked to fill out surveys on your overall experience with locked mode quizzes.
Google has updated plans for Google Sites and there are two key items:
Build more enterprise-focused features into new Sites (including ones from classic Sites): Google listened to extensive feedback from customers and have identified a number of features in classic Sites that are particularly valuable to larger organizations. They plan to add comparable functionality for those features, along with new and unique features, to new Sites. They believe these will help you use new Sites in different and exciting ways, while making the transition process to new Sites easier and more streamlined. See below for more details on specific features.
The final date to transition from classic Sites to new Sites will be the end of 2021: Also based on customer feedback, they realize that classic Sites still offers unique value to our enterprise customers today. Google will continue to invest in maintaining core classic Sites functionality until end of year 2021.
More features coming to new Sites
Create richer, more customized sites
Create and manage larger sites
Transitioning from classic Sites to new Sites In 2016 Google announced a new version of Google Sites, and in 2017 they announced that new Sites would eventually become the only version of Google Sites. They’ve heard feedback that classic Sites remains valuable for customers. They plan to maintain core classic Sites functionality. This will extend the deadline to transition from classic to new Sites to the end of 2021.
