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Google Workspace

Seven Google Updates from December 2023

by Emily Horn December 22, 2023

written by Emily Horn

Google never ceases to amaze me with its continuous improvements and updates. If you want to stay on top of changes to your Google Workspace, you can check out the Google Workspace Updates blog. You can also keep an eye on the What’s New in Google Workspace page, which allows you to search using keywords and filter by product. Let’s take a look at a few interesting updates that started rolling out this month!

Google Admin Console Updates

2-Step Verification (2SV)

If you are a Google administrator, it’s important to know that Google has started to enforce 2SV. This is an additional security measure to protect businesses and organizations from cybersecurity threats. For some admin, this change is already effective, and Google will be enforcing this across the board in 2024. Once this goes into effect for your domain, admins and super admins will be notified to turn on 2-step verification by a specified date. If 2SV is not enabled by the required date, you will be locked out of your admin account and forced to recover it. Google recommends going ahead and enabling it as soon as possible.

Learn More: 2SV

Google Classroom Updates

Excuse Assignments

Starting December 12, 2023, teachers have the ability to excuse assignments for absences, dropped grades, etc. in lieu of giving a grade. This heavily requested feature will be available to all users. With a gradual rollout, Google workspaces and personal users should have access to this feature by December 27.

Learn More: Excuse Assignments

Video Assignments

Now, users with Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade can create video assignments for students using YouTube videos. Add questions for students at different points throughout a video and see a dashboard of insights once they’ve responded.

Learn More: Video Assignments

Google Docs Updates

Placeholder Chips

We’ve been able to insert smart chips into Docs for people, dates, files, events, and places. Now we can insert placeholder chips for collaborators to complete! All users should be able to view placeholder chips by December 23.

Learn More: Placeholder Chips

Smart Compose

Smart Compose in Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings now does more than offer suggestions for writing content. It can suggest solutions to math problems! This feature is available to users with certain accounts. Depending on whether you’re a Gradual or Rapid Release domain, you may or may not have access yet.

Learn More: Smart Compose

Google Chat Updates

Mute/Unmute

All users will be able to mute and unmute conversations to disable notifications and push chats to the bottom of the conversation list. This feature is already available in mobile, and depending on whether you’re a Gradual or Rapid Release domain, you may or may not have access yet on the web version.

Learn More: Mute/Unmute

Shortcuts

You will now see shortcuts in your left sidebar menu. This permits you to easily go to the Home screen and access @ mention messages. Plus, you can now filter unread messages or view threads from Home. Rapid Release domains should already have access to this feature and Gradual Release domains will have visibility by December 26.

Learn More: Shortcuts

What do you think of these new updates? Don’t forget to take a look at the Google Workspace Updates blog for any newly added changes or features that may affect you and your organization.

December 22, 2023 1 comment

How to Create a Digital Badge Leaderboard

by Emily Horn October 13, 2022

written by Emily Horn

TCEA Area 15 Director, Sherry Hall, has an excellent idea for creating a digital badge leaderboard to enhance student engagement. You can create your own spreadsheet and badges or edit this template that Sherry has already created! This template is ready to go with badges, tabs, and formulas– it just needs your customized class list, skills, and badges. If you want to get creative and make your own, let’s walk through how Sherry does it. Watch the video and/or check out the steps outlined below!

How to Create a Badge Leaderboard Worksheet Using Google Sheets by Sherry Hall

Create Your Tabs

Type sheets.new in your Chrome search bar to open up a new Google Worksheet, and follow the steps below to get started.

Tab 1: Open Google Sheets and create a “Badge Leaderboard” tab. In Sherry’s example, she has her class list in the first column, a title and image in the first row, and the tools students are working on mastering as titles in row two (Drive, Docs, Slides, etc.). Here, we can see she is working on skills in Google Workspace.

Tab 2: Make a copy of the leaderboard tab by right-clicking on the tab and selecting “Duplicate.” Name this tab “Teacher,” because it’s just for you. Place checkboxes in each cell under the skills for each student name by highlighting the cells, clicking “Insert” in the menu bar, and then clicking “Checkbox” in the drop-down menu. Checkboxes will appear in all the cells you’ve selected.

Tab 3: Make a copy of the “Teacher” tab and name this tab “Badges.” Remove the class list column and the row one image, so only the tools appear. Insert the badges you’d like each student to receive for mastering each tool. To do this, select the cell, click “Insert” in the menu bar, click “Image,” and select the “Image in cell” option. We can see here that Sherry has inserted coordinating badges for each tool.

Set Up Data Validation

Go back to your “Teacher” tab, and click on “Data” in the menu bar.
Then select “Data validation” in the drop-down menu.
A pop-up box will appear, and you will need to make sure the criteria says “Checkbox,” the “Use custom cell values” box is checked, and set checked boxes to be “TRUE” and unchecked boxes to be “FALSE.”
Once these are set, click “Save.”

Protect Teacher and Badges Tabs from Student Editing

Under “Data” in the menu bar, click “Protected sheets and ranges,” and a menu will appear on the right side of the screen.
Select the “Sheet” tab, and click “Set permissions.”
Click “Restrict who can edit this range, and select “Only you” from the drop-down menu.
Click “Done.”
Click on your “Badges” tab and do the same!

Insert the IF Formula

I promise this isn’t as hard as it seems! You will only need to do one row of formulas, then drag the row of formulas down to fill the page, and Google Sheets will magically take care of the rest.

On the “Badges Leaderboard” tab, you will need to insert an IF formula in the first student’s row for each skill. Note: You can copy and paste the one I provided below and edit it as needed.

2. To do this, you will structure your formula like this:

IF Formula — Copy this formula to edit and use in your Google Sheet—> **=IF(Teacher!B3=TRUE, Badges!$A$2, )**

3. Once you’ve inserted the formulas in each row one cell for the first student, select all the cells in row one for that student, click the blue box in the bottom right corner of the last cell, and drag down over all the cells, like this:

Watch to learn how to quickly fill cells with a formula in Google Sheets!

4. As students master each skill, check the boxes in the “Teacher” tab, and the “Badge Leaderboard” will auto-populate with badges! Pretty neat.

Badges Leaderboard — *Example of Badges in the Badge Leaderboard Tab*

Sherry offers several free resources:

You can also download the entire folder of resources here. Thanks to Sherry for this fantastic idea! I can see this being used in a variety of ways at any grade level. How will you use a digital badge leaderboard? Leave us a comment to let us know.

October 13, 2022 0 comment

Google Tips and Tricks

Updates to Google Workspace

by Miguel Guhlin December 24, 2020

written by Miguel Guhlin

Powerful new updates for Google Workspace are now available. In this blog entry, you will find out about a few of those that impact how you interact with Workspace tools.

Google Classroom Rosters and Flipgrid

Before we jump into Google Workspace’s updates, let’s take a moment to celebrate. Flipgrid has a new feature to add class rosters directly from Classroom. That’s right; you can now add Google Classroom rosters to Flipgrid discussions. This facilitates student access and saves time for busy teachers. Click the image below to watch Flipgrid’s video introduction.

Another Flipgrid update is the ability for students to be able to record video AND audio. Flipgrid keeps making astounding additions to their product. Not only do you have closed captioning possible in Flipgrid videos, but now there’s more. You can take advantage of microphone-only mode, which makes audio recordings easy.

Two other neat features include Flipgrid shorts camera updates and nametag cover images. One feature I find exciting is how you can create a mixtape of student videos recorded in Flipgrid. Imagine how easy it is to create a summary of exciting learning happening in your learning space.

As amazing as Flipgrid’s new integration is for Google Classroom teachers, there’s more.

Did You Know?

Explore Google Classroom in more detail via TCEA’s online, self-paced course. The purpose of this course is to assist educators in becoming more comfortable with Google Classroom. Participants who successfully complete this course will receive a TCEA Google Classroom digital badge and completion certificate.

Google Workspace Updates

There have been a host of updates for Google Meet recently, as well as other nifty editing features. Let’s take these updates one at a time.

Google Meet

If you blinked, you may have missed Google Meet video call link’s appearance in a classic space. That space? Google Hangouts.

According to Google, face-to-face video calls have these limits:

10 people for Gmail and Google Workspace Basics
25 people for Business and Education

Google Meet settings are now changing, gaining a “sticky” feel. That is, if you turn off certain features in your settings, Meet will remember those and they will appear in future meetings. Of course, those sticky settings will only appear for meetings that use the same meeting code. Sticky settings are associated with specific meeting codes, not people. That means you can set custom settings for each meeting you are in.

Editing Office Files in Google Workspace

Are you a Microsoft Office fanatic, but are stuck in a Google world? Then Google Workspace has taken a few steps to make your life easier. Those new features include the following:

Edit MS Office files with Google tools on open
Multi-page orientation now possible in Google Docs
Macro converter for MS Excel to Google Sheets

Let’s dig into these new features.

Feature #1: Default Editing of MS Office

Editing Microsoft Office files is now set by default in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. This new feature may save you a double-click. In the past, you had to double-click to take a quick peek at the document. Now, you can click and open, going straight to edit mode.

Image Source: Google

Feature #2: Multi-Page Orientation

If you haven’t tried to put a portrait and landscape series of pages in Google Docs, you’ve missed out. Now you can insert section breaks that change page orientation. For example, maybe your first 10 pages are portrait, but for pages 11 through 15, you want to switch to landscape. What do you do? Rely on Google’s new multiple page orientations option.

Image Source: Google

Feature #3: Macro Converter

Oh, I can hear the Microsoft Excel advocates now. They aren’t ready to make the switch from Microsoft Excel to Google Sheets. “The macros never make it from an Excel workbook into Google Sheets,” they cry. Well, those days are coming to an end.

You now have a macro converter for Microsoft Excel. The macro converter does its thing with Excel files as it converts macros to Google Sheets format. Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code gets turned into Apps Script code. The Apps Script code works in Google Sheets.

Stay tuned for more updates from Google Workspace.

Feature Image Source

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

December 24, 2020 0 comment