Google Workspace for Education Overview - Summer 2021 Professional Development Google Classroom

Hello everyone, and welcome to this introduction to Google Workspace for Education. In this course, we will be previewing a number of essential tools in the Google Workspace for Education. By the end of the session, you'll know how to access the Google Workspace for Education apps, navigate your Google Drive, and hopefully get a few ideas for how to implement these tools in both your classroom and professional planning. In addition to this course, Educational Technology has a comprehensive website that includes resources for many of the tools we'll be discussing today at edtechtraining.palmbeachschools.org. Once on that page, click Livestream Resources on the left-hand menu. More information about our website will be at the end of this video. Thanks for joining me, and let's get started. So what is the Google Workspace for Education? The detailed answer is it's an environment of web-based applications that will allow you to plan and implement standards-based lessons to help meet the needs of diverse learners. These tools will help you to organize your students to interact with the content of the lesson in an engaging and rigorous environment, from previewing and identifying critical content all the way to practicing and deepening their knowledge. In addition, these tools are designed to improve your workflow, productivity, and dare I say, make your life just a little bit easier. Now the simple answer to what is the Google Workspace for Education? It's apps, just like you have on your phone. It's a collection of apps that are designed for use in professional environments, some specifically for classroom teachers. Today, we're going to take a tour of these apps and show you some of the really cool features and functions. So in short, it's all about helping you increase opportunities in your everyday workflow for critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity with your students, all while supporting the standards and learning objectives that you have for them. So what are some of the benefits to using the Google Workspace for Education? They're all free. They're ad-free. They're reliable. They're secure. They're available on any device or platform with 24-7 access, and you only use one login to access everything. Okay, so now we're going to talk about how do you get to your Google apps? Well, there's a little shortcut built in. It's called the app selector, and you can find it often in the top right-hand corner of your browser once you're signed into Google. Up there from the app selector, you can access a menu that has shortcuts to any tool that you're looking for. You can also type into your web browser once you're signed into Google. A little bit of a shortcut, type in https:// and then the name of the tool that you want to use, .google.com. So for example, if you're trying to get into your email, just mail.google.com. Calendar would be calendar.google.com. In order to demonstrate this, I'm going to start from square one. The first thing that you need to do is to sign in through the district portal, because in order to access these tools, you actually need to be signed in to two places, the district portal and to Google. Now those things don't automatically happen together, but I'm going to show you the step-by-step process of doing so. So from the district portal page, you're going to put in your employee ID and your password. So here you can see that I've signed into my district portal, and I've got all of these tiles available to me. You can think of these kind of like shortcuts, but I'm not yet signed into Google. In order to do that and automatically sign into Google, I'm just going to follow one simple step. I'm going to click on and access my email. And once this happens, it'll bring up Gmail. You'll see the little loading icon, and then that automatically signs me into Google where voila, I can see the app selector here in the top right-hand corner. And from here, I have this menu of shortcuts that I can use to access any app in the Google Workspace for Education. Now that we've talked about how to sign in and access your tools, we should really talk about the benefits of using Google Chrome as your browser to do so. So there are a lot of benefits to making Google Chrome your default browser. First and foremost, the idea that Google works best with Google. Since you're using all of these Google tools, you're less likely to encounter any snags or hiccups or glitches if you're using a Google browser. It's pretty much as simple as that. You also have the benefit of the idea that Google Chrome is available and will work across almost all devices. Your phone, whether it's an Android or iPhone, has an app to be able to access the Google tools that you can sign into. You can also sync your settings and your bookmarks that you save between all of your devices that you have Chrome installed on, which is nice. It allows you to go incognito if you need to access a personal account or something like that. You can also pin your tabs. You can also keep bookmarks or add useful extensions for some of these apps that'll make your workflow and productivity that much easier. You can also, if you accidentally close a tab, there's a feature that allows you to find the tab that you had just recently closed. So there's a ton of different utilities that are available in Chrome. So it's really recommended that you use it as your default browser. Now that we've discussed how best to access the tools and apps in the Google Workspace for Education, let's discuss Google Drive. Now when I use the word drive, I'm not using it in the sense one might when saying he or she drives a car. I mean it more in terms of a flash drive or hard drive, because that's essentially what Google Drive is. It's a digital filing cabinet for you to store and organize files and to access files that others have shared with you. You can think of Google Drive as a flash drive that is stored on a different computer that you can access from anywhere and from any of your devices. There are a lot of really cool benefits to using Google Drive and a lot of really nifty features that are available to us in Palm Beach County through Drive. First and foremost, there is unlimited storage. So with a normal flash drive or even a hard drive, you might end up running out of room. If, for example, you have student photo or video projects that you're saving, you'll run out of room relatively quickly. We don't have that problem in Palm Beach County through Drive because of unlimited cloud storage. So you never have to worry about running out of room. Another excellent feature is the ability to create files within Drive itself, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and then save them automatically. So you never have to worry about your computer being shut off unexpectedly and losing a file or hunting down a recovery file or anything like that. Your files will automatically save every few seconds while they're open. You can also store any type of file in your Google Drive, including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files. In addition to that, when opening those files, Drive gives you the option to automatically convert file types like Word documents to Google Docs, PowerPoints to Google Slides, and Excel documents to Google Sheets. So if you're thinking that you'll need to recreate all of your Microsoft Office files from scratch, that isn't the case at all. Even if you have no intention of converting a file, you can still upload a file on one device, let's say on your phone, store it in your Drive, and then download it to a different device. Any device, thanks to compatibility with all platforms and even mobile apps for most every Google tool. We'll get into how to do this later, but you can also share files immediately with collaborators and allow them to simply view and not edit your file, comment on it with suggestions, or edit the file directly. The ability to change these sharing settings as needed means that, for example, you could give edit access to a file that you and another teacher are working on together as part of a lesson, and then share it with a student and give them only access to view that file. So there's no longer a need to keep track of file versions or sending email attachments back and forth or anything like that. With the sharing functionality, Drive also allows you to view the activity history of the files you own, meaning you can access a menu that lets you see when the file was viewed and by whom, and how and when it was edited or modified, and who made those edits. And then lastly, we know that Google is all about searching. So when it comes to navigating your Drive and locating files and folders, what you need is only ever just a keyword search away. Speaking of navigating your Drive, let's start that discussion by looking at some of the basic navigation and organization features available. When you access your Drive, you'll see a screen that looks pretty similar to this, with a menu at the top left of your screen. Here you'll see submenus labeled Priority, My Drive, and Shared Drives. Priority will take you to files that have been grouped together by you or automatically suggested by Google to create workspaces. These are collections of documents that you frequently use together. My Drive gives you an overview of all the files you own in your Drive, displaying your folders and your most recently accessed files. Shared Drives displays drives that you have access to that are shared with others. These are commonly used to create team workspaces with files that need to be accessed by a number of people to keep things organized and avoid having to change the sharing settings on individual files. Anyone who is a member of a Drive can automatically access the files within it. Shared with me shows you what other people have shared with you. Below those, you'll see the Trash, where you can view, restore, or permanently delete removed files. When you first remove a file from your Drive, it will be moved to the Trash, where it will be permanently deleted after 30 days. Across the top of your screen, you'll see a gray search box, where you can use keywords to search your Drive for folders, files, or collaborators that may have shared something with you. If you select a file or a folder, you'll see a row of icons appear in the top right corner. These icons will allow you to get a shareable link to a file, add collaborators and share it directly with them by typing their email address, or remove the file from your Drive and send it to your Trash. If you right-click a file or folder, you will see options to move a file or folder to a different location within your Drive, including a Shared Drive, upload a new version, or revert to a previous version of a file, make a copy of a file, or to download a file directly to your device. Now, I mentioned this earlier, but since all of the Google Workspace for Education tools are connected to your Drive, there is an option within Drive to create a new file from any of those tools and add it automatically to your Drive by clicking the Plus New button in the top left-hand corner. Clicking on that Plus New button will bring up a sub-menu that allows you to pick how you want to add new files or folders to your Drive. You'll see an option to upload a file from your device, an entire folder, and all of its contents, or to create a new Google Doc, Sheet, Slide, Form, Drawing, or Site. We'll get a bit more into these different file types soon. Now that we've had an overview of Drive, let's dive in and take a look at what all of this looks like in real-time. Okay, so let's review and go through the process of accessing your Drive from the App Selector. I've logged in through the portal at mysdpbc.org. From here, if you've logged into it recently, you'll see Drive already as a tile in your portal. If not, you'll need to access it through the App Selector. I'm going to automatically sign into Google by clicking on the Mail tile. From my email inbox, I'm going to click on the App Selector in the top right-hand corner, and then I'm going to select Drive. Now when my Drive first loads, I'll see the menus that we went over earlier on the left-hand side, and I can also see the main window of my Drive organized into three sections. Files that I've worked on recently or frequently are going to appear in this Quick Access section. The folders that I own that I've created to kind of organize things a little bit will show up in the Folders section, and any files that I own that have not been organized into folders will appear here in this File section. When you move one of these owned files into a folder, let's say to keep things organized a little bit, it will no longer appear here in the File section. You can access the files that you move into folders by opening the folder or by using the search box up at the top of the screen. Now I have my Drive set to display in grid view because I'm a visual learner and I prefer to see thumbnails. If you want to change the look of your Drive, you have the option to display it in a list view. Click the icon in the top right to switch to a list view. Instead of a thumbnail, list view will give you the name of the file or folder, the owner of that file, and when it was last modified. Between list view and grid view, it's really a matter of personal preference. When you first access your Drive, it will display files in that grid view, so I'm going to keep it that way for now. You can switch back to grid view by clicking the icon in the top right again. On the left-hand side, you can see those different sub-menus that we went over earlier. Priority shows me workspaces that I've created. These are typically files that I will access together or work between frequently. My Drive is the default when you first load your Drive, so clicking that will bring me back to this familiar page with my files and folders. Shared Drives will bring me to the Drives that I share with others. You can use these to collaborate with colleagues and even organize student project groups, as you'll see I've done with a couple of the tiles in my shared Drives here. Beneath that, you can see the shared with me files. These are files owned by others who have given me access to view, comment on, or edit them. Now the thing about this section of your Drive is that you can't really organize these files and folders as they are the way that you can organize files and folders in your Drive by clicking and dragging them into folders. So if you want to, you can create a shortcut to any of your files here and add that shortcut to your Drive, which you can then organize. This shortcut will look like a normal file, but it will actually link back to the original file while adding it as an icon that you can organize in your Drive. It sounds complicated, I promise it's a lot easier than I'm making it sound. So because this is a file that's owned by somebody else, and if I want to add this as a shortcut to my Drive, all that I need to do is to right click and bring up this submenu. I'll see an option here where it says add shortcut to Drive, and if you need to, you can click on this little tidbit explaining it. It creates a shortcut that links to the original, allowing the item to appear in more than one location. So if I click that, I should then see that appear in my Drive. It gives me an option to send it to a specific folder or shared Drive. I'm not going to worry about this right now, but you can follow that same process to organize your shared files. Under your shared with me menu, you'll see recent. Clicking this will show you all of the files that you have accessed recently. Next, one of my favorite menus is the starred menu. This works best for individual files that you might need frequently, but that you don't necessarily need to add to a priority workspace. You can think of this as kind of a bookmark or a favorite function. Only files that you manually mark with a star will show up here. It kind of works like a highlighter that points out important files to you, but just like a highlighter, if you star all of your files, everything in your Drive is going to end up here. So be selective about what you add. To star a file, simply right click on it and then select add to start. That file will then show up in your starred files. Now selecting a file will also bring up another menu in the top right that will give you more options for that file. You can either double click it to open it or using this pop up menu in the top right, create a link that you can share, add collaborators, preview the file or trash it. If you select the three dots all the way over to the right, it brings up even more options of things that you can do. So let's say that I want to share this file. I've got options. If I select the link icon, it will bring up a menu that shows me who, if anyone I've shared this file with. It will also show me a link that I can copy and then send to someone or paste it into a document or an email. And it gives me options for setting sharing permissions. When determining your sharing permissions for files, it helps to know what each setting means. When sharing a file through Drive, it will display a drop down menu that allows you to choose how you want the file to be shared. A file or folder that you create automatically gives you ownership of that file or folder. And it means that you can do anything and everything with it. The same is true for anyone who you make an editor on a file that you share. If you invite someone to comment on a file, it means that they can view and comment and view only means just that. So be aware of the different levels of access you are giving someone when sharing a file. Also, it might be helpful to note that the default permission when sharing is set to the lowest level of access view only. If you don't want to share a link to your file and instead you want to invite individual collaborators, make sure that you have the file selected and you can either do that here in the get link menu. Or if you have the file selected, you can click on the share button. A window will open that will allow you to search for individual email addresses of those that you want to share the file with. After entering in an email address, you'll have the option to send collaborators an email and let them know that you've shared a file with them. If you ever need to change or revoke access to a file, you can change permissions at any time through Drive or in the file itself, as long as you're the owner. Now that we have a general understanding of how Google Drive works, let's take a tour of some of the applications in the Google Workspace for Education that will allow you to create engaging content for your students and communicate and collaborate with your colleagues. You can think of Google Drive as a hub of sorts and all of the connected app as spokes. Together, these tools work to form a singular workspace that helps you create a rigorous blended learning environment for your students, all the while keeping you organized and in contact with your colleagues and classrooms. Some of the most essential tools are those listed here because they help you maintain those connections. We're going to go ahead and start with Gmail. With our district email through Gmail, obviously its primary use is to send and receive emails, but there's a lot more that Gmail has to offer in terms of helping you stay connected and organized. When you first open your email, either by clicking on the mail tile in your portal, the icon in the app selector, or by typing in mail.google.com, you'll be taken to your primary email inbox. From here, you can check or compose mail and call it a day. There's a few more features that you should probably check out before you leave, though. You'll see up at the top tabs that help you organize your email according to sender and type. You can adjust these and other display settings by clicking the gear in the top right-hand corner of your window. This will bring up a quick settings menu that allows you to customize your display settings and how your inbox is organized. Experiment with different layouts here and see what works best for you. You'll also see a button up at the top that says, see all settings. If you're feeling brave, feel free to experiment with the advanced settings that can be found within this menu. On the left-hand side, you'll see a series of menu items. Inbox will display your default inbox, which is what you see when you log in. Starred will display emails that you have manually starred by clicking on the star icon next to the mail. This is a great place to keep track of important emails or those that you might need to reference later. Snoozed shows you emails that you've chosen to temporarily disregard or marked as temporarily unimportant. Just like hitting the snooze button on your alarm, snoozing an email will automatically dismiss the email notification for a set amount of time. You can snooze and unsnooze an email by hovering over the time next to the email in your inbox, then selecting the clock icon. This will give you options of how long you want to snooze this email for. You can manually unsnooze an email by going then into the snoozed category. Important shows you emails that you have manually marked as important or those that Google has decided are important for you. As you can see, every email in my inbox is marked as important because I personally don't use this feature. But, if I wanted to start, all I would need to do is begin unselecting unimportant emails to start telling Google what is important to me. Sent emails will show you emails you've sent and drafts will collect any emails you've begun to compose but haven't yet sent. Underneath your drafts, you'll see any labels that you've created to organize your emails into groups to help you quickly find communication specific to a particular person or topic. You can see I have a bunch of labels here. You can delete or rename or recolor a label by clicking to the right of the label. If you want to create a new label, scroll to the bottom of this list, then click more and then create new label. To add a label to an email, you can either open it or from your inbox, with the email selected, you'll see a menu appear up at the top. If you select the label icon, you can choose an existing label or create a new label. Next up, let's talk about Google Contacts. Contacts is a directory, kind of like an address book, that allows you to view, save, and create contact information. It's useful for searching for the information of anyone in the district. If you know a colleague or contact's name within Palm Beach County, you can easily search for his or her district email address and phone number using Google Contacts. We won't get into it today, but this tool is easy to use and I encourage you to check it out. Next, we'll take a look at Google Calendar. Google Calendar gives you the ability to plan, schedule, and keep track of events on your calendar, as well as see and share calendar events with others. To create an event on your calendar, click the plus create button in the top left hand corner. You'll be given options to schedule events at a particular time and location, as well as send invitations to others via email by typing their name into the search box. You can schedule a Google Meet video conference with colleagues as well. Using this feature will automatically create a Google Meet and send it as part of the email invitation to attendees. Using Google Calendar to schedule events will also automatically send reminder notifications prior to the event, and this setting can be changed, among other settings, in the more options menu. When an invited guest receives the invitation, they'll have the ability to RSVP to the event as part of the initial notification email. In addition to inviting others to events you create, you also have the option to view shared calendars and share your calendars with others, which can make collaborative planning that much easier. Shared calendars are also often created for schools to keep staff and students aware of school-wide events. In order to share your calendar with others, click next to your name. Then click on settings and sharing. From here, you can choose and search for individuals with which to share your calendar. To view and subscribe to other calendars, click the plus symbol next to other calendars. From here, you can search and subscribe to other calendars to have them display alongside your calendar. Once you've subscribed to another calendar, you'll be able to see that individual or organization's availability and events, which makes finding time for meetings that much easier. Lastly, Google Calendar also syncs with Google Classroom, and will by default show you the dates of assignments you have given in your classrooms. Now we'll look at one of the most important tools available for teachers through the Google Workspace for Education in terms of delivering instruction and making the blended classroom an engaging, creative, and collaborative learning environment for every student. I'm speaking, of course, of Google Classroom. Google Classroom is a virtual classroom that allows educators to create classes, distribute assignments, grade and send feedback, post links and materials, facilitate discussion and instruction, and see everything in one place. With Classroom, teachers can create secure environments in which to assign work. The features and possibilities available with Google Classroom are nearly limitless, so there's no way that this introduction will be able to cover the full expanse of what is possible with Classroom. Instead, I encourage you to check out the other courses available that dive deeper into Google Classroom, as well as the in-depth videos posted on the EdTech training website. I'll share that link again at the end of the course. Now, the first time that you access Google Classroom from either the app selector, the tile on the portal, or by going to classroom.google.com, if it's your first time here, you are not going to have any classes yet, so you'll need to create your first class. And you can do that using the plus icon in the top right-hand corner. If you hover over that, it'll say Create or Join Class. You can click that and then click Create Class. Now, I'm going to join a class or create a class here called Demo Class, and the subject is going to be 2021 Preschool. And then I'm going to click Create. Now, even though I've left these other areas blank, you can come back later and edit them. Now, this takes a moment as you create a class, it will automatically create a folder in your drive for that class where assignments and student work will be sent. You can see up here at the top, there is a class code. Now, I currently don't have any students and I don't want to invite students right away. I want to make sure that I have content on my class. But once I'm ready to invite students into my Google Classroom, I will share this code with them. And typically, I would do that in the classroom itself. But we know that in a blended learning environment, you may not be meeting face to face with them, at least initially. So while you can display the class code and have the students enter this into their devices, whether it be a classroom Chromebook or even an app, the Google Classroom app on their phone, you can also invite students to your class by clicking on the People tab. Now, right now, there's no one listed because I've just made this class. There's just myself in the teacher section. I can actually add students manually by clicking on the Invite Students button and then typing in either the student names or the student numbers, S followed by the student number. Now, this will go through the directory in the Palm Beach County School District and automatically pull up that student's information. And then once I have all of the students there, I can click Invite and it will send them all an email with instructions to join the class. But since I don't have any content here, I'm not going to invite any students just yet. Instead, I'm going to take a look at some of the features that are available here on Classroom. The first landing page that you come to is called the stream, and this works much like a social media stream where your most recent posts to your classroom will filter toward the top. And as they get older and new posts come in, they'll move down towards the bottom. You can also see upcoming assigned work in terms of assignments that are due soon or are upcoming due dates will be listed here in this upcoming box. Generally, you're going to want to do most of your work on the Classwork tab. The Classwork tab is where you assign work to your students and you can share materials here as well. So you can create assignments and questions. You can use topics to organize classwork into modules or units, and you can order the way that you want students to see that work, moving more recent units to the top of this classwork area. So to get started, you're going to click on the plus create button from here. You're going to choose between the different options available to you in terms of sharing materials with your students. You can either start off by creating a topic, let's say unit one or introduction to the course. But the first thing we're going to do is actually make a sample assignment. And I'm going to leave some instructions here. And I'm actually going to add an attachment from my drive. You have options when creating these assignments. Do you want there to be a link to an outside source? Do you want to attach a file directly from your device or perhaps embed a YouTube video? Or you can actually insert documents that you've already created within your drive. So I'm going to select this option. Now, it's going to take a moment to pull up my drive, but when it does, I'm actually going to select this nifty thing right here that I was able to make in Google Drawings. It's a sample plot diagram. And when I give this to my students, I can decide a couple of options for distribution. Either I can give them access automatically to view the file so I don't need to mess with any of the sharing settings in the file itself. I can also give them access to edit the file. And this is an option if you're having students work collaboratively on the same document, on the same slides presentation or Google Doc. This might be the route that you want to choose. But most often, if you're giving the students individual work, you are going to select this option, make a copy for each student. What this will do is it will auto create a copy of that assignment of that document that you've attached and add it to and give add it to the classroom Google Drive and give students access to edit that file before they submit it and turn it into you. Now, up here, up at the top, I can decide, do I want this assigned to all my students or do I want to pick from my list of students and select particular assignments? And this is a great opportunity to differentiate your instruction based on if you've had students that have been absent for a while or there are students who need extra practice. You can make those decisions here. Now, I don't have any students in the class right now, obviously, but if I did have students, I would be able to check and uncheck students from this list. If I want to assign it to all of them, I'll just leave this box check for all students. I can also adjust the point value here and then assign a due date. If you click on this, you'll be able to pull up a calendar and you can pick the time and day that you want that assignment due. Now, you can also add a topic. Since I don't have any topics, I'm going to have to go to create topic. And I'm just going to simply name this unit one. But now that all my ducks are in a row, I'm going to assign this work. I've got some options, though, if I choose the dropdown, I can decide whether I want to assign it and post it in the stream immediately. I can schedule it for a later time. Or if I'm not done working on this, I can save the draft. If I decided that I don't need this, I can discard the draft. But for now, I'm going to click sign. And this assignment will show up in the students stream and on the classwork tab. So here you see on the classwork tab is my sample assignment, and if I click over to the stream, there it is. Now, some other options you have for creating instructional materials are the quiz assignment, the question and the material. With quiz assignments, if you click on these, it will automatically generate a blank Google form that you can turn into a quiz complete with an answer key that allows for auto grading, which saves a lot of time. We'll get more into Google forms later. But for now, let's take a look at the other assignment types. You can also assign questions which are typically one answer responses. You can choose from this drop down list when you assign a question as either a short answer or a multiple choice question. If you choose multiple choice, it will give you options that the students can select. Now, there is no auto grading feature when it comes to questions, but these are excellent ways to get very quick formative assessments or exit tickets or even entrance tickets from your students. And the last feature that we're going to look at under the plus create button is the option that you have to share materials with your classes. Now, these are typically view only materials that you'll only allow the students to view. Now, these can be links. These can be handouts. You can create a handout from your drive that automatically gives the students only view access. You can share a YouTube video. But these aren't necessarily assignments to be graded. They're more for informational or instructional purposes. The last thing that we'll take a look at with Google Classroom is the ability to generate a meet code for your students. If you're hosting virtual Google meets to allow for online instruction or blended learning, you'll need an opportunity in a venue to be able to interact with those students in that blended environment. And you can do that easily by selecting the meet icon up at the top of the screen and then clicking on generate meet link. This will give you an automatic meet link that will be posted at the top of your Google Classroom. And you can make this link immediately visible to students or you can turn that off for now. Since I have no students, I'm just going to go ahead and leave that selected on and click save. From there, if I go back to my stream, I will see that meet link up there on the banner. If I use the material option to post information about the meet, I can tell my students when and how frequently we'll be meeting and having class. We'll talk more about Google Meet and Google Forms a little bit later. But for now, I really, again, want to encourage you to take a deeper dive into Google Classroom by enrolling in one of the offered courses that does just that and by checking out the resources available to you on the EdTech training website. Let's take a look at an incredibly important tool for both collaborative planning and instruction and blended learning environments. Google Meet. Google Meet is a video communication platform that allows you to connect with colleagues and students via webcam. With Meet, you can host or join scheduled or impromptu video calls with individuals or groups, easily add participants and present information to a live audience similar to how you would deliver instruction in a face-to-face setting. To start a meet, simply click the Meet icon in the app selector or go to meet.google.com. As we discussed earlier, you can also schedule meets ahead of time using Google Calendar or from Google Classroom. When you first access the Meet main page, you'll see a list of any upcoming meets that have been scheduled through Google Calendar. You'll also have the option to join a meet with a code or start a new meet. To start a new meet, click the plus join or start a meeting option. You'll see a box to enter a nickname. You can use this feature to allow others to easily find your meet. For now, I'm just going to click the continue button to create a meet without a nickname. You'll be taken to this waiting room screen that tells you your meeting is ready. If you're joining someone else's meet, the screen will display the names of those already in the meeting. You can also turn off your microphone and video by selecting the icons at the bottom of the preview window. Use the three dots in the bottom right of the preview window to explore other options. When you're ready, click join now. When you join the room, you'll see information that you can share manually with others to invite them to your meeting, including options for joining by phone. Clicking the add people button will bring up the familiar search to locate contacts within the district. You can access this joining information at any time during the meet by clicking in the meeting details menu in the bottom left of the screen. During your meeting, you can use the icons in the bottom center of the screen to mute and unmute yourself or turn your video back on or off. On the bottom right, you'll see options for closed captioning and presenting your screen, which allows you to share documents and presentations with anyone in the meeting. Clicking the dots in the bottom right will expand your options and will allow you to record the meeting, change the visual layout and adjust your audio and video settings. Any recorded meetings will automatically be added to your Google Drive in a folder titled Meet Recordings. In the top right of the screen, you'll see a little speech bubble. Click this to bring up the chat window. This feature works like a chat room with messages that can be sent and displayed while speakers are presenting and is a very useful tool for students to post questions as they have them and for you as the teacher to address them at an appropriate time. The people tab will show you all of the participants within a meet, and if you're the owner of the meet, it'll allow you to mute or remove participants. You can also use this feature to add participants. Now, like many of the other Google tools, there are a lot of other features that Meet has, so I encourage you to explore with the different features it offers and definitely look into some trainings that are offered by the EdTech team. Overall, these Google Workspace for Education tools help you to communicate and stay organized and give you the ability to create an effective learning and working environment. While you might be learning about some of these for the first time during this course, the Google Workspace for Education also includes access to a number of apps that you are probably already familiar with, whether you know it or not. The Google Workspace for Education tool set also includes productivity and creation tools that are very similar to Microsoft Office products that you've probably used in the past. Google Docs works very similar to Word, Google Sheets just like Excel, and Google Slides is similar to PowerPoint. All of these tools work very much like you would expect with some added features that are exclusive to Google. To explore some of these features, let's take a closer look at Google Docs. So first and foremost, how are you going to access Google Docs? How right you are, you're going to access Google Docs from your app selector or by going to docs.google.com. Now, if you access Docs by clicking on a doc in your drive, you'll simply open that document. But if you use the app selector or the URL, you'll be taken to this page, which displays any docs you might already have access to and also shows you a template gallery. This time saving feature allows you to create a new doc from an existing template, which saves time editing and formatting. Guess what? Templates are also built into Google Sheets, Slides and Forms as well. Now, you, of course, have the option to open a blank document. But for the sake of demonstration, I'm going to open up a document from the template gallery. As a word processing application, there are many benefits to using Google Docs as a productivity tool. Docs can be used for individual or group assignments, depending on how you post it to classroom agendas, meeting minutes, lesson plans, any and all digital handouts. The list goes on. There are also a few key features that set it apart from similar word processing programs. First, remember that all files created in Drive, including Docs, Slides, Sheets and Forms, will automatically save as you edit them. If I change the title of my lesson plan, I can look up at the top of the screen and see that the last edit was just a couple of seconds ago. That means that my document has been saved. And if I close it out, when I open it back up, it's going to be just as I left it. There's no need to manually save. With the autosave feature, you can monitor all changes made to the document over time by yourself or by others. If you click on File at the top of the screen and then you select Version History and C-Version History, you'll have a log of all edits that have been made in this document over time. This also creates versions of the document that you can restore if you need to. So, for example, let's say someone that you've shared this document with and that you've given access, edit access to, accidentally deletes part of your document. Oh, no, you can go into the version history and restore it to its pristine state. So important work won't be lost. Speaking of sharing, you can also easily share your files with collaborators by pressing the Share button in the top right hand corner of the screen. This button can be found in the same place in Sheets, Slides and Forms. From here, you can invite collaborators and determine their level of access. If another editor accesses the doc while you have it open, they'll be able to edit it or comment on it at the same time you are, which presents an amazing opportunity for real time collaboration with colleagues and student groups. In addition to editing the document directly, collaborators can leave comments. And instead of editing, can change their settings to suggesting. Now, this isn't the best suggestion because I don't think I've ever heard this referred to as the rock process, so I have the opportunity here to either accept that suggestion, which makes the edit a part of the document, or I can reject it and it'll go back to its original state. As I said earlier in the course, Google works best with Google. That means that docs can be attached in emails, calendar invites and LinkedIn sheets, forms and slides. You can also use links within your docs to link from file to file between apps in your drive or outside links, creating what we call a hyper doc. Now, here's an example of a hyper doc. This is an actual feeding agenda that I had with one of my teams of teachers last year where each of us was adding links and resources and some of the activities that we were planning to do with the students toward the end of the year last year. So you can see here there's a link to a Google Meet recording. Here there was a summer reading list sent out by our department heads. Here we have a Google Form activity and an external link to a website. And then down here we were brainstorming ideas for additional projects we could do. So if you take this process and you apply it to what can be done with student projects, docs, yes, they are a word processor, but it's also so much more. Google Docs is a productivity tool that allows you the opportunity to develop a creative and collaborative space for yourself and for your students. While sheets and slides are very similar to docs in terms of their functionality, and you might already be familiar with similar products from Microsoft, Google has one product that is unlike the others in terms of gathering information and giving assessments to students. Let's dive in and take a look at Google Forms. Google Forms are used by creators to gather data in the form of polls and surveys and by teachers to create activities. Just like Google Docs, Forms includes a template gallery that allows you to modify existing content to suit your purposes. From event registrations to feedback surveys, almost everything you could want to create already exists as a template in the gallery. For now, let's take a look at this assessment template. Now, Forms shouldn't only be used for assessments, they can be used to create some really engaging assignments that can do things like display embedded videos from YouTube and take students to different questions based on the answers they provide. But to get our feet wet with Forms, we'll take a look at a sample assessment as an example of something you can easily create and post on Google Classroom. This form is a quiz, which is what is created when you select the quiz assignment feature on Google Classroom. Because this form has been turned into a quiz, it allows for automatic scoring and the ability to create an answer key. To make a form into a quiz, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then select the quiz tab and toggle the slider next to make this a quiz. With quizzes, you can create custom questions and answer choices from scratch. You can use an existing template question or you can simply create a new one by clicking this plus button. Then select correct answers by clicking on the answer key. You can also adjust point values. When a student completes a quiz and submits it via Google Classroom, the student's responses will actually automatically be graded and can be imported into Classroom at the click of a button. Once the students have actually taken a quiz, if you click on the responses tab, you'll see an overview of the responses in order to get a quick idea of overall student progress and achievement. Now, there are no responses to this quiz yet because I've just made it. But let's take a look at one that I've actually given to my students in the past. Here's an example of a quiz that I gave my students last year. If I click on that responses tab and summary selected, I can see a general overview of how my students did overall. If I scroll down and take a look at some of the question types, I can see how many students got particular questions correct and what some of the most picked incorrect answers were. Now, this gives me a really good idea in terms of which successes I should be celebrating and which students might need to revisit the concepts from the lesson before this quiz was given. There is a lot to discover with Google Forms. And again, really, there's no way that we can cover all of the features offered in this course. So if you want a deeper dive into Google Forms, I encourage you once again to check out the other courses offered as well as explore the EdTech training website. The last tools we'll discuss are Google Drawings, Google Keep and Google Sites. Google Drawings is a hidden gem that allows you to draft and edit images and create custom shapes, charts, diagrams, drawings and images that can be inserted into some of the other apps like Docs, Slides and Forms. To create images, you can start with a simple geometric shape or use the line or text box tools to create your own. You can also insert an image from your drive or search the web for royalty free images to automatically insert into your drawing. When you're finished, you can share your drawing with collaborators directly or download it as a PDF, JPEG or PNG file. Google Keep is a nifty tool that allows you to create things like notes, reminders and to-do lists. There are some really inventive uses for Google Keep and it's relatively easy to use, so I encourage you to check it out. The last app we'll discuss is Google Sites, which allows you to create web pages or entire websites. We're actually not going to use the app selector this time. To access Google Sites, make sure that you go to sites.google.com forward slash new. If you don't include the forward slash new, you'll end up in an older version of Sites and the newer version is just much more user friendly and just plain slick. Just like some of the other apps, the newer version of Sites includes templates from which you can create a home page for your class or club, a gallery to showcase student work and digital portfolios or create a venue for student blogging. This is also a wonderful time to remind you about our edtech training website, which was, believe it or not, actually created using Google Sites. To check out what a finished site looks like and to find resources for many of the tools that we've discussed today, including a link to our YouTube channel with videos for all things related to technology in the classroom, head over to edtechtraining.pambeachschools.org. Once on that page, click live stream resources on the left hand menu and you'll be taken to our resources page where you can find many more resources and instructional videos for the Google Workspace for Education apps that we've discussed today. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes our introductory course to the Google Workspace for Education. Now, I understand that if it's your first time here, you might be overwhelmed. Not to worry. Included in this course are a number of resources that you can use to expand your learning, including access to the edtech training page, which hosts resources for each of the apps that we've discussed today. I've also provided a link to the Google for Education Teacher Center, which collects even more resources and ideas for implementation in the classroom. With these in hand, you can explore at your own pace and expand your knowledge so that you can create learning and working environments that are creative, collaborative, and tailored to fit the needs of your students. In addition to increasing your knowledge of the Google Workspace for Education, you also have the opportunity to earn in-service points for completing a follow-up activity that demonstrates the use of these apps in your planning and instruction. To do so, access the evidence of implementation document in the e-learning course. This document will instruct you to choose at least three Google Workspace for Education applications discussed during this course that you have used with your students. Provide evidence of your implementation by including URL links or screenshots for each of the three applications you choose on this Google Doc in the e-learning course. Instructions for how to share URL links and create screenshots are included in this document. You'll also need to include a brief written explanation of how each application was used to plan or implement engaging lessons or activities for your students in a blended learning environment. Again, instructions for completing this follow-up activity are included in the document. On behalf of the Department of Educational Technology training team and the EdTech team as a whole, thank you for learning with us today. We're happy to be here to support you in any way you need during the school year. If you need any assistance at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us via email because we're here to support you in being the best educator possible. So, thank you again. We appreciate you and we can't wait to learn with you again soon.